New Streptococcus pneumoniae clones in deceased wild chimpanzees

Abstract

In wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire, sudden deaths which were preceded by respiratory problems had been observed since 1999. Two new clones of Streptococcus pneumoniae were identified in deceased apes on the basis of multilocus sequence typing analysis and ply, lytA, and pbp2x sequences. The findings suggest that virulent S. pneumoniae occurs in populations of wild chimpanzees with the potential to cause infections similar to those observed in humans.

FIG. 1.

Sequence of the lytA gene obtained from the chimpanzee S. pneumoniae North/East clone. The S. pneumoniae R6 lytA sequence is used for comparison; N/E refers to the S. pneumoniae North/East clone. The vertical numbers indicate the codon, with the fourth digit representing the position within the codon. The amino acid sequence is indicated below (aa). Only nucleotides and amino acids that differ from those of the R6 sequence are shown.

FIG. 2.

Genetic relatedness of the chimpanzee S. pneumoniae clones to major clones of S. pneumoniae as described recently (21). Clones are identified by the country of isolation, followed by the serotype and the clone identification number. A SplitsTree representation is shown based on concatenated sequences of the seven housekeeping genes used for MLST analysis (10). The STs 2308 and 2309 were assigned to the chimpanzee S. pneumoniae clones.