New paper: Severe infections emerge from commensal bacteria by adaptive evolution

Published this month in eLife, our new paper on the evolution and adaptation of Staphylococcus aureus during infection.

This study shows that the emergence of life-threatening infections of the major pathogen Staphylococcus aureus from bacteria colonizing the nose is associated with repeatable adaptive evolution inside the human body.

First author Bernadette Young has summarized the paper's findings on the Modernising Medical Microbiology blog.

Promiscuous bacteria have staying power

An insight article with Ruth Massey on John Lees' and Stephen Bentley's new paper was published in eLife on Friday:

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a notorious bacterial pathogen hiding in plain sight. A common resident of the nose and throat, between 68% and 84% of young infants will carry this species at any given time (Turner et al., 2012). In most cases it causes no harm, yet the presence of pneumococci – as the bacteria are known – can predispose a person to life-threatening infections like pneumonia or meningitis. Indeed, pneumococci are responsible for around 10% of all deaths in young children around the world (O'Brien et al., 2009), with the vast majority of cases being in developing countries.
Research into S. pneumoniae is complicated because the species is a patchwork of distinctive strains and some of these strains remain in the nose and throat for longer than others. Now, in eLife, John Lees and Stephen Bentley – both at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute – and colleagues report that strains rendered impotent by a virus do not linger for as long as other strains (Lees et al., 2017).

Click here to read the full piece.