High virulence of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus ST30-SCCmecIVc-spat019, the dominant community-associated clone in Argentina

FERNANDEZ, SILVINA; LEDO, CAMILA; LATTAR, SANTIAGO; NOTO LLANA, MARIÁNGELES; BERTELLI, ANDREA MENDOZA; DI GREGORIO, SABRINA; SORDELLI, DANIEL O.; GÓMEZ, MARISA I.; MOLLERACH, MARTA E.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MEDICAL MICROBIOLOGY (PRINT)

ELSEVIER GMBH

Año: 2017 vol. 307 p. 191 - 199

1438-4221

Community-acquired methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus emerged as a worldwide health problem in the last few years. In Argentina, it is found in 70% of skin and skin structure infections in previously healthy adult patients and causes severe invasive diseases. The ST30-SCCmecIVc-spat019 clone is predominant in adult infections and has displaced the previously prevalent ST5-SCCmecIVa-spat311 clone in community settings. In the present work we compared the virulence of both clones in order to explain the displacement, and found that ST30-IVc is associated with invasive infections in adult patients from Argentina and possesses a different virulence-associated genes profile compared to ST5-IVa. A representative strain of ST30 lineage has a more aggressive behavior in animal models of infection and expresses higher level of Fibronectin binding protein A coding gene, which could enhance the bacterial invasion capacity.