Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2025
Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster V29
Höfundar / Authors: Jan Franzen1,2, Ana Carpio Espinosa1,2, Thomas Roder3, Martin Larralde4, Sonja Kittl5, Simon Feyer5, Isabelle Brodard5, Faezeh Farhoosh1,2, Marco Kreuzer3,6, Rémy Bruggmann3, Pamela Nicholson6, Evy Goosens7, Wiep Klaas Smits3,8, Horst Posthaus1
Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: 1 Institute of Animal Pathology, Department of Infectious Diseases and Pathobiology, Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland 2 Graduate School for Cellular and Biomedical Sciences, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland 3 Interfaculty Bioinformatics Unit, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland 4 Leiden University Center of Infectious Disease (LUCID), Leiden University Medical Center
Kynnir / Presenter: Jan Franzen
The anaerobic bacterium Clostridium perfringens is widespread in the environment and as an intestinal commensal but can also cause various diseases in animals and humans. Important virulence factors of pathogenic isolates are pore forming toxins (PFTs), most of which are carried on conjugative plasmids. Additionally, in a yet incompletely understood manner, pathogenic C. perfringens strains can rapidly proliferate in their hosts and cause severe tissue damage. Secondary metabolites encoded by biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) have been described to promote growth in bacteria but are still poorly described for C. perfringens. Advances in sequencing technology have facilitated genomic investigations for this important pathogen. However, most sequencing data do not yet provide circularized genomes and plasmids of C. perfringens. To address this gap, we sequenced 236 C. perfringens isolates from animals, including pigs, horses, dogs, cats, alpacas, parrots, cattle, sheep, and goats. Of these, 143 were isolated from animals with typical signs for a C. perfringens associated disease determined at necropsy. PacBio long read sequencing was used for most isolates, resulting in a total of 211 closed chromosome equivalents and 888 plasmids. 381 publicly available C. perfringens genomes were added to contextualize our analyses. We identified 2 previously undescribed PFT homologs, two novel putative plasmid conjugation loci, six PFT sequence variants and 428 BGCs.