Vaccination Drives Changes in Metabolic and Virulence Profiles of Streptococcus pneumoniae
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| Authors: | Eleanor R Watkins Bridget S Penman José Louren?o Caroline O Buckee Martin C J Maiden Sunetra Gupta |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.; 2. Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.; Emory University, UNITED STATES, |
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| Abstract: | The bacterial pathogen, Streptococcus pneumoniae (the pneumococcus), is a leading cause of life-threatening illness and death worldwide. Available conjugate vaccines target only a small subset (up to 13) of >90 known capsular serotypes of S. pneumoniae and, since their introduction, increases in non-vaccine serotypes have been recorded in several countries: a phenomenon termed Vaccine Induced Serotype Replacement (VISR). Here, using a combination of mathematical modelling and whole genome analysis, we show that targeting particular serotypes through vaccination can also cause their metabolic and virulence-associated components to transfer through recombination to non-vaccine serotypes: a phenomenon we term Vaccine-Induced Metabolic Shift (VIMS). Our results provide a novel explanation for changes observed in the population structure of the pneumococcus following vaccination, and have important implications for strain-targeted vaccination in a range of infectious disease systems. |
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