Dutch_pneumococcal_carriage_isolates

We have an ongoing project focused on samples from all meningitis cases in the Netherlands since 2006 (G1377). This is a collaboration between the group of Diederik van der Beek (neurologist at AMC), Jeff Barrett (Human Genetics) and Pathogen Genomics. We have genotyped 1200 culture-proven meningitis patients and have access to 4500 random controls. For the pathogens we have sequenced 2700 isolates which are mostly linked with the human genotypes and include 700 blood-CSF paired samples. The majority of pathogen isolates are Streptococcus pneumoniae (1500). We have detailed clinical data for all cases and the main drive of the analysis is to search for genetic associations with disease in both the human and the pathogen data. To further strengthen the analysis we wish to generate a genome dataset of pneumococci collected from healthy carrriers in the Netherlands over a contemporary time period. To acheive this we are collaborating with the Dutch reference lab (Dr. Hester Bootsma) and have agreed an appropriate collection of 1000 carriage isolates.