New clues found in tracing the origin of the deadly E coli strain and an appeal for the sharing of additional data

Following previous efforts, BGI and their collaborators at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, as well as a growing number of researchers around the world “crowdsourcing” this data, are exploring in-depth the European disease outbreak helping trace the origin and spread of the lethal E. coli strain. Different sources have reported that two strains, 01-09591 from Germany isolated in 2001 and 55989 from Central Africa in 2002, are highly similar to the 2011 outbreak strain. Based on a the most recently curated assembly publically released by the BGI yesterday (ftp://ftp.genomics.org.cn/pub/Ecoli_TY-2482), these strains have an identical Multi Locus Sequence Typing (ST678) based on analysis of 7 important “housekeeping” genes*. The relevance of this data is we are now tracing the history of the bacteria, as this latest analysis indicates that the two German strains (01-09591 originally isolated in 2001 and TY2482 from the 2011 outbreak) have identical...