Vaccination Drives Changes in Metabolic and Virulence Profiles of Streptococcus pneumoniae

PLoS Pathogens

Caroline O. Buckee¹  Sunetra Gupta²  Eleanor R. Watkins²  Martin C. J. Maiden²  Bridget S. Penman²  José Lourenço² 

[1] Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America;Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

关键词: Vaccination;    immunization;    Vaccines;    Virulence factors;    Genetic loci;    Antigen encapsulation;    Immunity;    Pneumococcus;    Genome analysis;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.ppat.1005034

学科分类：生物科学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

The bacterial pathogen, Streptococcus pneumoniae (the pneumococcus), is a leading cause of life-threatening illness and death worldwide. Available conjugate vaccines target only a small subset (up to 13) of >90 known capsular serotypes of S. pneumoniae and, since their introduction, increases in non-vaccine serotypes have been recorded in several countries: a phenomenon termed Vaccine Induced Serotype Replacement (VISR). Here, using a combination of mathematical modelling and whole genome analysis, we show that targeting particular serotypes through vaccination can also cause their metabolic and virulence-associated components to transfer through recombination to non-vaccine serotypes: a phenomenon we term Vaccine-Induced Metabolic Shift (VIMS). Our results provide a novel explanation for changes observed in the population structure of the pneumococcus following vaccination, and have important implications for strain-targeted vaccination in a range of infectious disease systems.

【 授权许可】

CC BY