Abstract

With 3.4 million infections each year, invasive non-Typhoidal Salmonella (iNTS) is a major cause of illness worldwide. In Sub-Saharan Africa bloodstream infections with iNTS Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium are causing ~388,000 deaths annually. Co-infection with HIV or malaria in adults, and a young age (

Using a combination of comparative genomics and comparative transcriptomics, we discovered phenotypic differences that distinguish African from global Salmonella pathovariants (Canals et al., 2019).

Our analysis led us to identify a single core genome SNP responsible for the up-regulation of a single promoter in strain D23580 that controlled the expression of a Salmonella virulence factor (Hammarlöf et al., 2018), and offers part of the explanation of the pan-African epidemic of bloodstream infection.

All of the Salmonella transcriptomic data we have generated are now available online in a user-friendly website that allows intra-strain and inter-strain comparisons of gene expression: http://bioinf.gen.tcd.ie/cgi-bin/salcom_v2.pl

References

Canals et al. (2019) Adding function to the genome of African Salmonella Typhimurium ST313 strain D23580 . PLoS Biology 17(1): e3000059.

Hammarlöf et al. (2018) Role of a single noncoding nucleotide in the evolution of an epidemic African clade of Salmonella. Proc. Nat, Acad. Sci. USA 115 : E2614 – E2623 .