ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Antimicrobials, Resistance and Chemotherapy
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1575216
High genome diversity of Klebsiella pneumoniae strains isolated from a Chinese Traditional Medicine Hospital in Jiangsu province, China,2023-2024
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Public Health, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China
- 2Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control And Prevention, Nanjing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Objective: Klebsiella pneumoniae (KP) poses a global health threat with regional variations. Data on the genomic characteristics and drug resistance profiles of KP isolates in eastern China, however, are limited. To address this gap, we collected KP isolates from a traditional Chinese medicine hospital in Jiangsu Province, China, to characterize these features.Methods: from February 2023 to February 2024, 117 KP isolates were collected from a Chinese traditional medicine hospital in Jiangsu province, China. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing and whole-genome sequencing were performed on all isolates. Then capsular serotype, multi-locus sequence typing, virulence genes, resistance genes were determined using Prokka and Kleborate software. Hypermucoviscosity phenotype were detected using string test.Antimicriobal susceptibility were tested according to Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute Standards using commercially prepared and dehydrated panel.Chi-square test was employed to test the difference of virulence gene profile between hypermucoviscosity and non-hypermucoviscosity. Results: High resistance rate to ampicillin (98.7%) and doxycycline (41.0%) was observed in the KP strains.Resistance to cephalosporins ranged from 10% to 20%, and 23.7% of strains were multidrug-resistant (MDR). Sixty-six resistance genes from 13 categories were detected, including carbapenem-resistant genes in four KP strains. The most common capsular serotypes were K1 and K2(24.0% of isolates). O1 was the dominant O antigen type(52.1%). The KP strains were classified into 62 sequence types (STs), with ST23, ST29, ST412, and ST111 being the most prevalent(each representing>5.0% of isolates). The carriage rates of virulence gene-aerobactin, yersiniabactin, colibactin, salmochelin, RmpADC, and RmpA2, were 44.4%, 47.9%, 11.1%, 54.7%, 55.6%, and 31.6%, respectively. All ST23 KP strains carried virulence plasmids other than RmpADC. Hypermucoviscosity (HM) KP was observed in 23.4% of the isolates. HM KP carried a higher number of virulence genes compared to non-HM KP. Conclusions: While no single dominant(KP) clone or serotype/sequence type was identified among the isolated KP strains in this hospital, overall resistance rates remained relatively low. However, the relatively prevalent ST23 KP strains, which carried multiple virulence genes, are a concern due to their potential to acquire a carbapenem resistance gene.
Keywords: Klebsiella pneumoniae, virulence genes, drug resistance phenotype, hyperviscosity phenotype, antimicrobial
Received: 19 Feb 2025; Accepted: 17 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Guo and Si. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hongxiong Guo, Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control And Prevention, Nanjing, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.