Defining DNA differences to track and tack...(demiological studies aiming to track dow...)
demiological studies aiming to track down and treat carriers, could be used to eradicate typhoid as a disease."
There are 17 million cases of Typhoid fever each year - although the World Health Organization cautions that this is a 'very conservative' estimate. Young people are most at risk: in Indonesia, nine out of ten cases occur in 3-19-year-olds.
"A key to survival of Salmonella Typhi is its ability to lie dormant in carriers, who show no symptoms but remain able to infect others," says Kathryn Holt, a PhD student at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and first author on the study. "Our new tools will assist us in tracing the source of typhoid outbreaks, potentially even to infected carriers, allowing those individuals to be treated to prevent further spread of the disease.
"Using the genomic biology of this study, we can now type Typhi, identify the strain that is causing infection, identify carriers and direct vaccination programmes most efficiently. It is a remarkable step forward."
The study is a collaboration between researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, University College, Cork, Institut Pasteur in Paris and Oxford University Clinical Research Unit, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The team studied 19 isolates of Typhi from ten countries, using new sequencing methods that meant they could capture the rare signals of genetic variation in this stubborn genome. They produced more than 1.7 billion letters of genetic sequence and found evidence of fewer than 2000 mutation events, suggesting very little evolution since the emergence of Typhi at least 15,000 years ago.
Their analysis shows that the Typhi genome is decaying - as it becomes more closely allied to us, its human host, it is losing genes that are superfluous to life in the human body. More importantly, genes that contain instructions for the proteins on the surface of the bacterium - those most often atta
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| Contact: Don Powell don@sanger.ac.uk 44-012-234-96928 Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Source:Eurekalert |
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