First Description of a Yersinia pseudotuberculosis Clonal Outbreak in France, Confirmed Using a New Core Genome Multilocus Sequence Typing Method

Cyril Savin (1, 2, 3) , Anne-Sophie Le Guern (1, 2, 3) , Fanny Chereau (4) , Julien Guglielmini (5) , Guillaume Heuzé (6) , Christian Demeure (1, 3) , Javier Pizarro-Cerdá (1, 2, 3)

1 Yersinia
2 CNR - Centre National de Référence de la Peste et autres Yersinioses - National Reference Center Plague and Yersinioses
3 CC-OMS / WHO-CC - Centre collaborateur de l'OMS Yersinia - WHO Collaborating Center Yersinia
4 Direction des maladies infectieuses - Infectious Diseases Division [Saint-Maurice]
5 Hub Bioinformatique et Biostatistique - Bioinformatics and Biostatistics HUB
6 ANSES - Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l'alimentation, de l'environnement et du travail

Yersinia pseudotuberculosis is an enteric pathogen causing mild enteritis that can lead to mesenteric adenitis in children and septicemia in elderly patients. Most cases are sporadic, but outbreaks have already been described in different countries. We report for the first time a Y. pseudotuberculosis clonal outbreak in France, that occurred in 2020. An epidemiological investigation based on food queries pointed toward the consumption of tomatoes as the suspected source of infection. The Yersinia National Reference Laboratory (YNRL) developed a new cgMLST scheme with 1,921 genes specific to Y. pseudotuberculosis that identified the clustering of isolates associated with the outbreak and allowed to perform molecular typing in real time. In addition, this method allowed to retrospectively identify isolates belonging to this cluster from earlier in 2020. This method, which does not require specific bioinformatic skills, is now used systematically at the YNRL and proves to display an excellent discriminatory power and is available to the scientific community.

Keywords: Yersinia pseudotuberculosis; outbreak; epidemiological investigation; cgMLST; enteric yersiniosis

Domains: Vaccinology; Allergology; Adaptive immunology; Innate immunity; Infectious diseases; Bacteriology

Cyril Savin, Anne-Sophie Le Guern, Fanny Chereau, Julien Guglielmini, Guillaume Heuzé, et al.. First Description of a Yersinia pseudotuberculosis Clonal Outbreak in France, Confirmed Using a New Core Genome Multilocus Sequence Typing Method. Microbiology Spectrum, 2022, 10 (4), ⟨10.1128/spectrum.01145-22⟩. ⟨pasteur-03916947⟩