A Supervised Statistical Learning Approach for Accurate Legionella pneumophila Source Attribution during Outbreaks.

ABSTRACT: Public health agencies are increasingly relying on genomics during Legionnaires' disease investigations. However, the causative bacterium (Legionella pneumophila) has an unusual population structure, with extreme temporal and spatial genome sequence conservation. Furthermore, Legionnaires' disease outbreaks can be caused by multiple L. pneumophila genotypes in a single source. These factors can confound cluster identification using standard phylogenomic methods. Here, we show that a statistical learning approach based on L. pneumophila core genome single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) comparisons eliminates ambiguity for defining outbreak clusters and accurately predicts exposure sources for clinical cases. We illustrate the performance of our method by genome compariso

SUBMITTER: Buultjens AH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5648911 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature