Identification of Yersinia at the Species and Subspecies Levels Is Challenging

Abstract

The genus Yersinia currently includes species, of which Y. enterocolitica and Y. pseudotuberculosis are enteropathogenic. The identification of Y. enterocolitica in particular is very demanding, because it consists of a group of very heterogeneous bacteria, including pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains. The aim of the review is to provide recent information on the characteristics and identification of Yersinia spp. and sources of enteropathogenic Yersinia spp. Identification of Yersinia spp. is still mainly based on biochemical tests and serotyping, but molecular methods have increasingly also been used. Sequencing the whole genome enables more accurate identification of enteropathogenic Yersinia spp. Pathogenic Y. enterocolitica strains of different bioserotypes have newly been identified from various animal sources. Moreover, the virulence gene ail has been detected in non-pathogenic Yersinia strains, especially from wild animals. Correct identification of pathogenic Yersinia strains is essential in assessing the health risk for humans and animals.

A comprehensive review on the prevalence, pathogenesis and detection ofYersinia enterocolitica

“…57 As most of these are based on "Taqman and SYBR green" methods, this gene-based serotyping scheme can be applied for the reliable identication of toxic Y. enterocolitica. 58,59 The high-resolution melting technology (HRMT) is one of the recent advancements in molecular biology for the detection of bacteria by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), hypervariable repeats and mutations in PCR amplicons. The changes in nucleotides at specic sites can be monitored in closed-tube analysis aer PCR and then, the uorescence of the PCR products labelled with specic dyes can be detected to observe the transformation of unfused and melted DNA.…”

Comparative genomic insights into Yersinia hibernica – a commonly misidentified Yersinia enterocolitica-like organism

“…hibernica isolates shows that all sequenced isolates share this deletion. Indeed, sucrose-negative Y. enterocolitica- like isolates have been reported from environmental sources [46] but without sequencing [8] and since the 16S rRNA gene for Y. enterocolitica and Y.…”

“…However, identification of Yersinia is challenging especially in regards to the heterogeneous nature of the Y. enterocolitica species [6, 8]. Originally, it was thought that certain biotypes or phylogroups of Y.…”

Yersinia canariaesp. nov., isolated from a human yersiniosis case

“…One such suspected Yersinia isolate, denoted NCTC 14382 T , was isolated from an adult human female in the United Kingdom after travel to the Canary Islands in 2018 (8). Identification of Yersinia to the species level by traditional biochemical methods is difficult due to heterogeneous biochemical phenotypes (9), thus all Yersinia isolates receipted at the GBRU are routinely sequenced via an Illumina HiSeq 2500 and subsequent bioinformatics speciation is based on a k-mer (18-mer) based approach comparing k-mers to a known reference database (8). The closest match for this isolate by number of k-mers in the database was Yersinia enterocolitica.…”