Debra E Bessen, Bernard W Beall, Andrew Hayes, Weihua Huang, Jeanne M DiChiara, Srinivasan Velusamy, Hervé Tettelin, Keith A Jolley, John T Fallon, Sopio Chochua, Mosaed S A Alobaidallah, Charlie Higgs, Timothy C Barnett, John T Steemson, Thomas Proft, Mark R Davies
Among genes present in all group A streptococci (GAS), those encoding M-fibril and T-pilus proteins display the highest levels of sequence diversity, giving rise to the two primary serological typing schemes historically used to define strain. A new genotyping scheme for the pilin adhesin and backbone genes is developed and, when combined with emm typing, provides an account of the global GAS strain population. Cluster analysis based on nucleotide sequence similarity assigns most T-serotypes to discrete pilin backbone sequence clusters, yet the established T-types correspond to only half the clusters...
April 9, 2024: MBio