Genome-wide identification of host-segregating epidemiological markers for source attribution in Campylobacter jejuni

Campylobacter is among the most common worldwide causes of bacterial gastroenteritis. This organism is part of the commensal microbiota of numerous host species, including livestock, and these animals constitute potential sources of human infection. Molecular typing approaches, especially multi-locus sequence typing (MLST), have been used to attribute the source of human campylobacteriosis by quantifying the relative abundance of alleles, at 7 MLST loci, among isolates from animal reservoirs and human infection, implicating chicken as a major infection source. The increasing availability of bacterial genomes provides data on allelic variation at loci across the genome, providing the potential to improve the discriminatory power of data for source attribution. Here we present a source attribution approach based on the identification of novel epidemiological markers among a reference pan-genome list of 1810 genes identified through gene-by-gene comparison of 884 genomes of C. jejuni isola...