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. 2022 Mar 15:12:860163.
doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2022.860163. eCollection 2022.

First Report of a Methicillin-Resistant, High-Level Mupirocin-Resistant Staphylococcus argenteus

Adebayo Osagie Shittu  1   2 , Franziska Layer-Nicolaou  3 , Birgit Strommenger  3 , Minh-Thu Nguyen  2 , Stefan Bletz  4 , Alexander Mellmann  4 , Frieder Schaumburg  2
Affiliations

First Report of a Methicillin-Resistant, High-Level Mupirocin-Resistant Staphylococcus argenteus

Adebayo Osagie Shittu et al. Front Cell Infect Microbiol. .

Abstract

We describe the identification of a methicillin-resistant, high-level mupirocin-resistant Staphylococcus argenteus. The isolate (1801221) was characterized as t6675-ST2250-SCCmecIVc, and whole-genome sequencing revealed that the isolate possessed two plasmids. One plasmid (34,870 bp), designated p1_1801221 with rep23, harboured the mupirocin resistance (mupA) gene. The second plasmid (20,644 bp), assigned as p2_1801221 with rep5a and rep16, carried the resistance determinants for penicillin (blaZ) and cadmium (cadD). Phylogenetic analysis revealed that the isolate clustered with the European ST2250 lineage. The overall high similarity of both plasmids in S. argenteus with published DNA sequences of Staphylococcus aureus plasmids strongly suggests an interspecies transfer. The pathogenic potential, community and nosocomial spread, and acquisition of antibiotic resistance gene determinants, including the mupA gene by S. argenteus, highlight its clinical significance and the need for its correct identification.

Keywords: high-level mupirocin resistance; identification; methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus argenteus; plasmid; whole-genome sequencing (WGS).

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
S. argenteus (1801221) on Columbia Blood Agar (37°C, 48 hours).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Neighbor-joining (NJ) tree of 111 S. argenteus ST2250 global isolates. SNPs (n = 2,177) were extracted from 1,864 core genome genes present in all isolates and formed the basis to calculate the NJ tree with default parameters within the Ridom SeqSphere+ software. We used iTOL V. 6 (Letunic and Bork, 2021) to display the tree and metadata of the strains. The leaves of the tree were annotated with the sample names. The colored circle indicates the country of isolation and the outer circle the isolation year, respectively. Isolate 1801221 is highlighted in a yellow box.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Comparison of S. argenteus plasmids with closely related S. aureus plasmids. The inner black ring represents the reference sequence, and the blue ring depicts the respective S. argenteus plasmid sequence. The outer black ring provides annotation information, i.e., detected ORFs, where the annotation resulted in known genes. The blue color’s intensity is related to the sequence similarity, detailed in the Supplementary Table. (A) depicts the comparison of p1_1801221 and the conjugative S. aureus plasmid pPR9 harboring the mupA gene encoding for mupirocin resistance (colored in red); (B) shows the comparison of p2_1801221 and the S. aureus plasmid p515718a harboring blaZ and cadX encoding for beta-lactam and cadmium resistance, respectively.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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