Dive into the depths of marine biology and discover how the genomic analysis of Enterococcus faecium from oceanic bivalves is unraveling critical One Health concerns and revealing unexpected connections to human healthcare.
– by The Don
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Genomic insights into Enterococcus faecium isolates from marine bivalves highlight One Health concerns and healthcare linkages.
Heim et al., Microb Genom 2023
DOI: 10.1099/mgen.0.001154
Listen folks, we’ve got a situation with these Enterococcus faecium – they’re causing big problems in hospitals, believe me, big problems with drug resistance. But we’re looking at the oceans, the beautiful, vast oceans, and we’re asking, are they part of the problem? We’ve got these bivalves, you know, clams and mussels, and we’re using them to find out what’s going on along the Norwegian coast. We’re doing it big – we took samples from 86 different locations, that’s a lot of locations, and we’re checking for these enterococci.
We’ve got this method, the most probable number (MPN) method, very reliable, very accurate, and we’re identifying these little bugs with something called MALDI-TOF-MS. Sounds fancy, right? It is. And we’re not stopping there – we’re testing them against all sorts of drugs to see if they can resist them. We’ve sequenced the genomes of 148 of these E. faecium isolates, and we’re comparing them to other genomes from all over – hospitals, people, everywhere.
Now, here’s what we found: enterococci are in 287 of 471 bivalve samples. That’s a lot, but the numbers are low, very low – less than 18 MPN per 100 grams. We’ve got different species, but E. faecium, Enterococcus hirae, and Enterococcus faecalis are the main ones. And guess what? 41% of them resist at least one drug, but none, I repeat, none are resisting the big guns – vancomycin or linezolid.
The diversity, it’s huge, tremendous diversity in these E. faecium. But the good news, the best news, is that most of them are not the types causing trouble in hospitals. Only three, just three, might be linked to healthcare settings. That’s not a lot, folks.
So, we’re doing something great here – we’re keeping an eye on these microbes, checking their DNA, their resistance, and it’s telling us a lot about pollution in the ocean too. We’re doing it systematically, thoroughly, because that’s how you get the best data, the most incredible data, to understand what’s really going on with these enterococci in the marine environment. And that’s how we’re going to keep winning against these drug-resistant infections.