Abstract:
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are one of the most common non-malignant extra-intestinal
infection in urology with 300 million infections occurring annually worldwide.
Uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC), a gram-negative, multi drug resistant bacteria is
the primary causative agent among the microbial spectrum involved in UTIs. Structural
and secreted virulence factors of UPEC mainly contribute to the etiology of UTIs. Over a
period of years, there is steady rise in number of UPEC infections in our setup and abuse
of antibiotics have ensued in increased antibiotic resistance with subsequent increase in
multi-drug resistant (MDR) E.coli strains. However, not much is known about the genetic
attributes of different UPEC lineages in Pakistan. For a better understanding of genomic
diversity, virulence and resistance determinants a local UPEC isolate was characterized
and comparative genome analysis with global strains was carried out. The UPEC isolate
U1 is a virulent multi-drug resistant strain with a genome size of 5.2 Mb containing 5376
coding sequences and a total of 389 subsystems. The strain U1 belongs to ST131 and have
O25:H4 serogroup. It harbors several resistant determinants, four plasmids (designated as
pU1_1, pU1_2, pU1_3 and pU1_4) harboring a TEM-1 resistant gene, 4 complete
prophages, 3 miniature inverted repeats, 2 composite transposons, 15 insertion sequences
and several virulence genes. Comparative analysis revealed that the strain U1 has a similar
resistance and virulence profile reported earlier for strains from Sequence type 131.
Moreover phylogenetic analysis revealed that the isolate U1 is evolutionary related to strain
UPEC 4_0 and strain O25:bH4 were reported from Sweden and Saudi Arabia respectively.
These genetic insights will be helpful for effective control measures against this pathogen,
for health care providence as well as research and development (R & D) organizations
