Pathogenomic study of Clostridium difficile strains

In the present study we conducted a gene-wide analysis from nine couples of C. difficile strains. Each couple is composed of a high potential virulence (HPV) strain associated with its control (CON) strain. The HPV strains were chosen using two clinical criteria: prevalence and severity. The prevalent strains, defined in this study by an overrepresentation in European hospital, were associated with phylogenetically close control strain but rarely found in hospital. In other hand, the severe strains sampled on patient with very serious symptoms were associated with phylogenetically identical strain but that gave mild symptoms in another patient. The aim of this work was to determined if we could explain at least a part of the clinical criteria differences between these nine couples of strains in the light of their genomic and transcriptomic differences. Total RNA was extracted from one sample of each of the 17 C. difficile strains of the study.