Characterization of Neisseria meningitidis strains causing disease in complement-deficient and complement-sufficient patients

Abstract

Serotyping and serosubtyping of meningococci showed no difference between isolates from 44 complement-deficient persons and from 50 complement-sufficient persons with meningococcal disease. Multilocus enzyme electrophoretic typing of the meningococci revealed 54 electrophoretic types that were equally distributed among isolates from complement-deficient and complement-sufficient patients. Analysis of strains isolated from eight complement-deficient persons with 11 recurrences of meningococcal disease showed that one strain was identical to the strain previously isolated from the same individual. Our results indicate that there are no differences between the clonal distributions of strains infecting complement-deficient and complement-sufficient patients. Most recurrences were infections caused by different strains.

FIG. 1

Genetic relationships among 54 ETs of 105 Neisseria meningitidis isolates recovered from complement-deficient (CD) and complement-sufficient (CS) patients in The Netherlands. The dendrogram was generated by the average linkage method of clustering from a matrix of coefficients of genetic distance on the basis of 14 polymorphic enzyme loci. ETs are numbered sequentially from top to bottom. The number of strains from complement-sufficient and complement-deficient patients within a certain ET are indicated, as is the complement deficiency factor (NI, not identified deficiency). Strains from complement-deficient patients with second or third episodes of meningococcal disease are marked with an asterisk.