PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Kelly L Wyres
AU  - Ryan R Wick
AU  - Louise M Judd
AU  - Roni Froumine
AU  - Alex Tokolyi
AU  - Claire L Gorrie
AU  - Margaret M C Lam
AU  - Sebastián Duchêne
AU  - Adam Jenney
AU  - Kathryn E Holt
TI  - Distinct evolutionary dynamics of horizontal gene transfer in drug resistant and virulent clones of <em>Klebsiella pneumoniae</em>
AID  - 10.1101/414235
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 414235
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/12/414235.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/12/414235.full
AB  - Klebsiella pneumoniae (Kp) has emerged as an important cause of two distinct public health threats: multidrug resistant (MDR) healthcare-associated infections1 and community-acquired invasive infections, particularly pyogenic liver abscess2. The majority of MDR hospital outbreaks are caused by a subset of Kp clones with a high prevalence of acquired antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes, while the majority of community-acquired invasive infections are caused by ‘hypervirulent’ clones that rarely harbour acquired AMR genes but have high prevalence of key virulence loci3–5. Worryingly, the last few years have seen increasing reports of convergence of MDR and the key virulence genes within individual Kp strains6, but it is not yet clear whether these represent a transient phenomenon or a significant ongoing threat. Here we perform comparative genomic analyses for 28 distinct Kp clones, including 6 hypervirulent and 8 MDR, to better understand their evolutionary histories and the risks of convergence. We show that MDR clones are highly diverse with frequent chromosomal recombination and gene content variability that far exceeds that of the hypervirulent clones. Consequently, we predict a much greater risk of virulence gene acquisition by MDR Kp clones than of resistance gene acquisition by hypervirulent clones.