Truemors
My curiousity about how biological outbreaks can be identified and tracked -- such as the recent Maple Leaf Foods outbreak in Canada -- lead me to this abstract. Genome sequencing, or a type of 'DNA fingerprinting' appears to be the tool.
A startling fact buried in this draft article: a unique strain of listeria persisted for 12 years in a food processing facility. Does this mean sanitation was poor, or ineffective, or that Listeria monocytogenes can join the ranks of 'super bugs'?
While increasing data on bacterial evolution in controlled environments are available, our understanding of bacterial genome evolution in natural environments is limited. We thus performed full genome analyses on four Listeria monocytogenes, including human and food isolates from both a 1988 case of sporadic listeriosis and a 2000 listeriosis outbreak, which had been linked to contaminated food from a single processing facility. All four isolates had been shown to have identical subtypes, suggesting that a specific L. monocytogenes strain persisted in this processing plant over at least 12 years. While a genome sequence for the 1988 food isolate has been reported, we sequenced the genomes of the 1988 human isolate as well as a human and a food isolate from the 2000 outbreak to allow for comparative genome analyses.
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