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Volume 25, Number 8—August 2019
Dispatch

Emergent Invasive Group A Streptococcus dysgalactiae subsp. equisimilis, United States, 2015–2018

Sopio Chochua, Joy Rivers, Saundra Mathis, Zhongya Li, Srinivasan Velusamy, Lesley McGee, Chris Van Beneden, Yuan Li, Benjamin J. Metcalf, and Bernard BeallComments to Author 
Author affiliations: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

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Figure 1

Analyses of invasive group A Streptococcus dysgalactiae subspecies equisimilis and conserved genomic pepD gene insertion site of highly related exotoxin speC gene–containing prophages found within group A ST128 S. equisimilis strain and S. pyogenes strain SP1336. Methods are described in the Appendix. A) Phylogenetic tree of 35 invasive group A S. dysgalactiae subsp. equisimilis (GAS/SE/MLST128 [ST128] complex) isolates and 13 unrelated group C, G, and L SE isolates recovered through the Centers

Figure 1. Analyses of invasive group A Streptococcus dysgalactiae subspecies equisimilis and conserved genomic pepD gene insertion site of highly related exotoxin speC gene–containing prophages found within group A ST128 S. equisimilis strain and S. pyogenes strain SP1336. Methods are described in the Appendix. A) Phylogenetic tree of 35 invasive group A S. dysgalactiae subsp. equisimilis (GAS/SE/MLST128 [ST128] complex) isolates and 13 unrelated group C, G, and L SE isolates recovered through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Active Bacterial Core surveillance during January 1, 2015–November 1, 2018. Trees are drawn to scale; branch lengths indicate number of substitutions per site. Surveillance areas (https://www.cdc.gov/abcs/reports-findings/surv-reports.html) are indicated: EB, East Bay San Francisco area, California; NY, New York; NM, New Mexico; CA, San Francisco Bay area, California; OR, Oregon; CO, Colorado; GA, Georgia; CT, Connecticut. Different counties and years of isolation are indicated (e.g., EB1–15 indicates county 1 in East Bay area and year 2015). The left tree depicts all 49 isolates and the right includes only the subset of the 36 GAS/ST128/SE (also including GAS/ST128/SE described by Brandt et al. [3] and assigned GenBank accession no. HE858529). Three pairs of isolates differing by 13 or fewer single-nucleotide polymorphisms are shown in red. Single-locus variants of the indicated multilocus sequence types are indicated with asterisks. B) Conserved genomic pepD gene insertion site of highly related exotoxin speC gene–containing prophages found within group A ST128 S. equisimilis strain (middle) and S. pyogenes strain SP1336 (GenBank accession no. CP031738). The nonfunctional pepD structural genes lacking bases 1–4 are depicted in the 2 prophage-containing strains. Nucleotide sequence identity is scaled from 70% (yellow) to 100% (green). The S. equisimilis prophage also contained the virulence-associated DNase gene spd1 as shown and previously described for the depicted SP1336 phage shown (8). Within both species, the pepD insertion site lies within a region between the conserved bacterial cell division genes ftsE/ftsX and the small ribosomal protein gene rpsL31b (GenBank accession no. for S. equisimilis AC2713 is HE858529).

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Page updated: July 16, 2019
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