Genome sequences of E. coli urosepsis isolates

Urosepsis is a bacteraemia infection caused by an organism previously causing an infection in the urinary tract of a patient, a diagnosis which has been classically confirmed by culture of the same species of bacteria from both blood and urine samples. Given the new insights afforded by sequencing technologies into the complicated population structures of human infectious agents, we sought to investigate urosepsis by comparing the genome sequences of blood and urine isolates of E. coli from 5 urosepsis patients. The results confirm the classical urosepsis hypothesis in four of the five cases, but also show the complex nature of extra-intestinal E. coli infection in the fifth case, where 3 distinct strains caused two distinct infections.