Escherichia coli causing recurrent urinary tract infections: Comparison to non-recurrent isolates and genomic adaptation in recurrent infections

Recurrent urinary tract infection (rUTI) remains a major problem for many women and therefore the pursuit for genomic and phenotypic traits which could define rUTI has been ongoing. The present study applied a genomic approach to investigate recurrent urinary tract infections by comparative analyses of recurrent and non-recurrent Escherichia coli isolates with respect to phylogenetic clustering and genomic traits. In addition, genomic variation between the 1st and following infection was studied. The results show that recurrent isolates do not cluster distinctively in a core genome phylogeny. We identified several genes which were more common in the rUTI, including nine fimbrial genes. Finally, we found limited adaptation between the recurrent infections based on single nucleotide polymorphism analyses and whole-genome comparisons.