Development of Kaptive databases for Vibrio parahaemolyticus O- and K-antigen serotyping

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is an important food-borne human pathogen and is divided in 16 O-serotypes and 71 K-serotypes. For serological typing, agglutination tests are still the golden standard, but many V. parahaemolyticus isolates are serologically not typable. Recently, the software tool Kaptive was developed which can identify O- and K-loci from whole genome sequencing data of Klebsiella. In this study we manually identified and extracted all O- and K-loci from the genomes of in-house sequenced V. parahaemolyticus isolates and publicly available genomes, serotyped these when needed and developed Kaptive databases for all O- and K-loci. We describe these Kaptive databases with the identified O- and K -loci, which can be used to identify the O- and K-serotypes of V. parahaemolyticus isolates from whole genome sequencing data.