LiSEQ – whole-genome sequencing of a cross-sectional survey of Listeria monocytogenes in ready-to-eat foods and human clinical cases in Europe

Anaïs Painset (1, 2) , Jonas T Björkman (3) , Kristoffer Kiil (3) , Laurent Guillier (4) , Jean-François Mariet (4) , Benjamin F Elix (4) , Corinne Amar (1) , Ovidiu Rotariu (5) , Sophie Roussel (4) , Francisco Perez-Reche (6) , Sylvain Brisse (7) , Alexandra Moura (8) , Marc Lecuit (8) , Ken Forbes (5) , Norval Strachan (5) , Kathie Grant (1, 2) , Eva Møller-Nielsen (3) , Timothy Dallman (1, 2)

1 Public Health England Gastrointestinal Bacteria Reference Unit [London]
2 University of Liverpool
3 Statens Serum Institut [Copenhagen]
4 LSAl - Laboratoire de sécurité des aliments de Maisons-Alfort
5 University of Aberdeen
6 ICSMB - Institute for Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology [Aberdeen]
7 Biodiversité et Epidémiologie des Bactéries pathogènes - Biodiversity and Epidemiology of Bacterial Pathogens
8 Institut Pasteur [Paris]

We present the LiSEQ (Listeria SEQuencing) project, funded by the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) to compare Listeria monocytogenes isolates collected in the European Union from ready-to-eat foods, compartments along the food chain (e.g. food-producing animals, food-processing environments) and humans. In this article, we report the molecular characterization of a selection of this data set employing whole-genome sequencing analysis. We present an overview of the strain diversity observed in different sampled sources, and characterize the isolates based on their virulence and resistance profile. We integrate into our analysis the global L. monocytogenes genome collection described by Moura and colleagues in 2016 to assess the representativeness of the LiSEQ collection in the context of known L. monocytogenes strain diversity. DATA SUMMARY All FASTQ reads from this study have been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information short-read archive (SRA) under the BioProject PRJNA475189.

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]; Life Sciences [q-bio]; Human health and pathology; Infectious diseases; Life Sciences [q-bio]; Microbiology and Parasitology; Bacteriology

Anaïs Painset, Jonas T Björkman, Kristoffer Kiil, Laurent Guillier, Jean-François Mariet, et al.. LiSEQ – whole-genome sequencing of a cross-sectional survey of Listeria monocytogenes in ready-to-eat foods and human clinical cases in Europe. Microbial Genomics, 2019, 5 (2), ⟨10.1099/mgen.0.000257⟩. ⟨pasteur-02139091⟩