Global spread and evolutionary convergence of multidrug-resistant and hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae high-risk clones

Abstract

For people living in developed countries life span is growing at a faster pace than ever. One of the main reasons for such success is attributable to the introduction and extensive use in the clinical practice of antibiotics over the course of the last seven decades. In hospital settings, Klebsiella pneumoniae represents a well-known and commonly described opportunistic pathogen, typically characterized by resistance to several antibiotic classes. On the other hand, the broad wedge of population living in Low and/or Middle Income Countries is increasing rapidly, allowing the spread of several commensal bacteria which are transmitted via human contact. Community transmission has been the original milieu of K. pneumoniae isolates characterized by an outstanding virulence (hypervirulent). These two characteristics, also defined as "pathotypes", originally emerged as different pathways in the evolutionary history of K. pneumoniae. For a long time, the Sequence Type (ST), which is defined by the combination of alleles of the 7 housekeeping genes of the Multi-Locus Sequence Typing, has been a reliable marker of the pathotype: multidrug-resistant clones (e.g. ST258, ST147, ST101) in the Western world and hypervirulent clones (e.g. ST23, ST65, ST86) in the Eastern. Currently, the boundaries separating the two pathotypes are fading away due to several factors, and we are witnessing a worrisome convergence in certain high-risk clones. Here we review the evidence available on confluence of multidrug-resistance and hypervirulence in specific K. pneumoniae clones.

Keywords: Klebsiella pneumoniae; carbapenem; convergence; global pathogen; hypervirulence; multidrug-resistance.

Figure 1.

Alluvial diagram depicting the distribution of the various clonal groups (CGs) (left) in the sequence types (STs) that compose them (center), sorted by country (right).

Figure 2.

Minimum spanning tree representing one of the potentially many relationship which link the isolates belonging to the different high-risk clones. Numbers on the branches indicate the Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms differentiating the connected Sequence Types.