Hello, and thank you for listening to the Microbinfeed podcast. Here, we will be discussing topics in microbial bioinformatics. We hope that we can give you some insights, tips, and tricks along the way. There's so much information we all know from working in the field, but nobody writes it down. There is no manual, and it's assumed you'll pick it up. We hope to fill in a few of these gaps. My co-hosts are Dr. Nabil Ali Khan and Dr. Andrew Page. I am Dr. Lee Katz. Both Andrew and Nabil work in the Quadram Institute in Norwich, UK, where they work on microbes in food and the impact on human health. I work at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and am an adjunct member at the University of Georgia in the U.S. Hi, and welcome to the Microbinfeed podcast. I'm Nabil, and I'm your host for today. Today we're going to be talking about our study into invasive non-typhoidal salmonella in rural Gambia. Joining me today is two special guests. We have Grant McKenzie, who is a clinical epidemiologist working at the MRC unit, the Gambia, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and also Abdoulaye Kante, who is a higher scientific officer in the Genomics Core Facility, also working at the MRC unit, the Gambia, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Since it's both of your first times, who are you and what do you both typically do? Let's start with Grant. Thank you, Nabil and Andrew, for inviting us to join you. I'm working for the last 13 years, actually, in West Africa in Gambia with the MRC unit. I'm a clinical epidemiologist and pediatrician by background, and I'm usually involved in invasive bacterial disease surveillance in the rural area of the Gambia. We have lots of doctors and nurses and microbiology laboratory and x-ray service, data centre, about 500 kilometres from the coast in the middle of nowhere, where we've got a population of three or four hundred thousand people under demographic surveillance. All of this system works in with the government health system to detect cases of pneumonia or sepsis or meningitis or malaria coming to the health facilities in the area. We investigate the sick children and we can use that surveillance data to look at the effects of certain interventions over time. We're also doing other sort of interventional studies as well, but that's the main thing that I'm involved in. OK, and what about you, Abdele, who are you and what do you typically do? Thank you very much, Nabil. I work at the Genomics Core Facility at the MRC unit in Gambia at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I joined the unit in 2007 as a laboratory technician, and over the years I've worked in different projects and laboratories, including microbiology, molecular biology, as well as genomics. I'm currently working in the genomics platform. So my background is microbiology. I have an MSc in bioinformatics from the University of London. So at the genomics lab, my typical day would involve either sitting on my desk doing bioinformatics analysis on genomics samples, or maybe in the lab preparing library for sequencing. So I do both. Just to say, our genomics platform is a well-equipped, state-of-the-art, state-of-the-art equipment for next-generation sequencing. So we have both the Illumina and the Nanopore technologies in our lab. So I'm happy to say we are the first to be certified by Nanopore as a service provider in Africa. Okay. And, I mean, this is a very naive question. Last time when we were talking about Norwich and Norfolk, we had to explain where that actually is. So just indulge me, Abdele, could you tell us where the Gambia actually is and who are the people who live there? So the Gambia is named after its navigable river, which runs from the western part of the country to the eastern part. It's found in the western part of Africa, and sometimes it is called the Smiling Coast of Africa. It is a small country with a population of about 2 million people. The country is made of six regions. MRCG operates in almost all these regions. One of the regions where we did our study is called the URR, Upper River Region, and is found in the eastern part of the country, where the Pneumococcal Surveillance Project has been going on since 2007, led by Dr. Grant, looking at the impact of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine introduced in the Gambia. And Grant, I mean, you did touch in your introduction some of the different work that you're doing, but specifically, what is some of the more critical projects you're handling through the MRC unit? I'll just mention some of the historical work at the MRC unit in the Gambia. So actually, malaria transmission was defined in the Gambia, defined as a mosquito-borne disease. Then there's been further fairly groundbreaking research over 40 or 50 years. So the use of insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria was first demonstrated in large, randomized trials in the Gambia. Hepatitis B vaccine was first trialed in the Gambia and shown with a 30-year follow-up to prevent hepatocellular carcinoma. Haemophilus influenzae type B vaccines were trialed in the Gambia. Pneumococcal vaccines have been trialed in the Gambia. Both of those vaccine trials directly led to global vaccine policy change. Malaria vaccines and malaria treatments have been investigated a lot. There's a lot of TB research as well. We're now sort of starting to explore other areas in those strict infectious diseases. Personally, myself, I'm more involved in child health. So as we look into pneumococcal vaccine effectiveness in the country, we also study the effect of malnutrition on susceptibility to sepsis or meningitis or pneumonia. We also study how to best diagnose these conditions, what gives risk factors for these conditions. Just at the moment, we've started a large cluster randomized trial looking at two different schedules of pneumococcal vaccination to see whether instead of the usual three-dose schedule, you can safely use a two-dose schedule. This is relevant because the vaccine is relatively expensive and a good number of countries have not even introduced the vaccine because of its expense. So we'll be determining whether you can safely use two doses rather than three. That's keeping me busy at the moment. Is that the PCV13? That's right. Yes. It's actually following on the heels of the UK. The UK is the first country in the world to transition from a three-dose to a two-dose pneumococcal vaccine schedule. But trying to see whether that type of approach is safe in a high transmission, high burden area in Africa. And are you backing that up with genome sequencing? We are not actually, no. Sorry. Disappointing. Steve Bentley was doing a lot of work on pre and post vaccination for pneumococcal disease. I think we need to do something. Okay. Well, let's dive into a specific topic then of invasive non-typhoidal salmonella. And I think really, if we're going to dive deep into it, we've got to lay a bit of background down and help people along who aren't too up to speed on the biology. So let's start off with just defining like, what's the difference between invasive versus non-invasive salmonella? Abdoulaye, what would you say to that? Yeah, I mean, to make it very simple for our listeners, invasive salmonella, that could mean infection of salmonella outside the gut, because we know salmonella is normally found in the gut microbiome. So this is sometimes called extra-intestinal disease, where salmonella infects invasive sites as blood, causing sepsis, bacteremia, or other phenotypes. Non-invasive salmonella is the infection of salmonella in the gut. This is normally self-limiting, gastroenteritis, and it normally comes in the form of diarrhea. Okay. And then I guess the other axis we've got to explain is the difference between typhoidal and non-typhoidal salmonella. Yeah. So here we're talking about salmonella enterica. So we know taxonomically, salmonella can be divided into two, salmonella bongori and then salmonella enterica. So, but the latter is also subdivided into six subspecies. The subspecies one is the one that is well studied because it's the one that infects humans and animals. So we have more than 2,500 cerebus. So some cerebus within these species are implicated in life-threatening infection, and they exclusively infect humans. This includes salmonella enterica typhi. So this collectively, they call them typhoid or paratyphoid disease. They normally cause typhoid and paratyphoid disease respectively. This group of cerebral are called typhoid or salmonella. And we have other cerebral that are not within this group, and they are called non-typhoid or salmonella. So the two major ones we know that causes disease in the world and in Africa is the typhimidium and the enterodontitis. They are known to cause more than 75 million cases a week, 25,000 deaths or more. But in sub-Saharan Africa, they are also implicated in causing life-threatening infections such as septicemia, pneumonia and meningitis. So that is a big difference. So that is why clinically it's difficult to distinguish between the typhoid and non-typhoid in sub-Saharan Africa because both these cerebrals are known to cause invasive disease in our setting. I was just going to ask, is the typhoid vaccine being used in The Gambia? I'm not very sure about that. And second question, is there much burden of typhoid? In our surveillance over 10 years, we were taking blood cultures from all ages in our population of about 300,000. And I think we isolated about 20 cases, 25 cases of typhoid disease or typhoid isolates. So it's not highly prevalent. It's quite different in other countries in Africa. In Ghana, there's a lot of typhoid disease and in East Africa and Southern Africa, I think there's more. Why is this an issue in The Gambia specifically then? What drives that major change that we see? We don't see typhoid, we see other cerebrals instead. That's a very good question. I don't think we really know the answer. I mean, we know that typhoid is often associated with poor hygiene and food handling. In West Africa, I guess the density of living, urban living is not so great as some of the more dense areas of East and Southern Africa. But really, I don't think we know the answer to that question. So it's all speculation, really. Typhoid is very much a problem in Asia, Southeast Asia and Asia. I guess the next question is, this is an area of more research. And then how can whole genome sequencing help us combat Salmonella in The Gambia generally? Yeah, so we know that sequencing of bacterial pathogens is getting cheaper. And we know that in The Gambia, MRC in The Gambia has the genomic facility, which makes it very important for pathogen genomics studies. We understand that the ability to dig into the Salmonella genome could set light on the different virulent factors, as well as antimicrobial resistant genes and plasmids that have been harbored by these pathogens. So we've also seen that using whole genome sequencing, we can actually tell the dominant genotypes that are circulating in our setting with possible explanation of why are they dominant. So, for example, in Malawi, we've seen that they've used whole genome sequencing, but have highlighted a distinct genotype of Salmonella-type medium ST313. So with a possible clonal replacement, it was driven by acquisition of chloramphenicol resistance. So this was actually done using whole genome sequencing. Similarly, in our study that we're going to talk about today, we've seen that some of these NTS non-typhoidal Salmonellas that harbor a cytolithic distending toxin gene, a particular gene that has been known to be harbored by Salmonella typhi in most of our serovas. So we probably, we think this is the reason why we have an expulsion of these serovas, because invasive disease is more than the known predominant serovas, typhimidium and enterovirus. Yeah, before we get into the study, before you actually started this work, what were you hoping to find? So over the years, during the PSP study, Dr. Grant actually observed that some of these non-typhoidal Salmonella serovas which were not reported to be predominant are actually coming up. And when we had a discussion, the first thing I thought about was, my first guess was actually that they might be acquiring some viral factors that are not in the other serovas. Or maybe there is an environmental factor that is giving them this selective advantage. But yes, that was actually my guess when we had this discussion. Grant, anything you'd like to add? In most of Africa actually, enteritidis and typhimidium have been the dominant causes of invasive non- typhoidal Salmonella disease throughout all of Africa. And a lot of vaccine development is based on those serovar antigens. Even in the year 2000-2005, we were seeing that typhimidium was causing 60-80% of our invasive cases. But then we started to see quite a dramatic change where typhimidium and enteritidis were becoming less common and other serovars were becoming more common. And this was a concern because it could have implications for vaccine development. Antibiotic resistance is relatively common. But the real question is, could this be a change that might spread throughout other regions in Africa or have important implications for vaccine strategies? Because it's a relatively active field to try and develop a vaccine against non-typhoidal Salmonella. So, as Abdoulaye mentioned, we thought we would try and look at genomic aspects that might explain this. Why does invasive non-typhoidal Salmonella generally only happen in Africa? Not so much in developed countries. It's probably just because of a poor gut lining with malnutrition and tropical enteropathy. And the bacteria, you know, translocate from the gut into the blood a lot easier when you've got a very poor gut lining. So, I don't think that this problem is going to go away. And we just wanted to understand more about why the serovars were changing in prevalence. Let's get down into the actual study itself. And just before we talk results, I mean, which samples are you investigating and how were they collected? So, we had the population-based surveillance for nine years. So, the strength of that design is that you theoretically try and detect every case in the community. You avoid bias due to healthcare seeking, due to potential hospitalized cases being different to the general cases in the community. So, whenever a sick child came to a health facility, to nine of our health facilities, we would do a blood culture. And so, we had about three or four thousand blood cultures every year for nine years. And we looked at blood culture to provide advice for doctors to provide treatment for children. And, you know, we obviously found quite a bit of Salmonella disease. Maybe 10% of it was typhoid, but a lot of it is non-typhoid. At the beginning, we were finding maybe 20%, 25% of the cases were not typhimurium and not enteritidis. But then by the last five years, it was more like 60% of the cases were not typhi and not typhimurium. So, that's a pretty dramatic change and we really wanted to understand why that might happen. Yeah, you're seeing this replacement to Salmonella that aren't the usual suspects. And from that large sample set that you have over several years, some were selected for sequencing. And maybe Abdoulaye wants to comment, how were they done? How were they sequenced? Yeah, so the sequencing was not done in the Gambia. At that time, we don't have the sequencing facility. So, all the samples that grew Salmonella were isolated and extraction was done here in Fajara, where I am. And then they were sent to Sanga, where the sequencing was done. So, they were sequenced using the Illumina Hi6 2500, producing 125 base pairs, sequencing FASCQ-5. So, this was generally done in Sanga. I suppose that's where I come in. Because I got involved in this project by being in a Sanger. And by complete chance, one day, a guy called Gordon Dugan walks in with a guy called Nooradeen, who works with Grant. And he had some data and we did some analysis. And out of that, I got talking to him. grant and I went to the Gambia twice and I never met Grant in the Gambia but I did meet Ablai and we have worked on it over the past few years worked on this data and Ablai has come over to visit Quadram as well for a month to work with myself and Nabil so it's been a great informal collaboration no grants are written about this it's just we've come together and we've worked on the project together to get a little paper out so it's very important to network so that's just a little aside yeah it's worked very well it's been very good yeah so as Andrew mentioned so when I went to Quadram it was really a great pleasure to meet you there and Andrew himself so some of the skills that I learned during my bioinformatics course in Kilimeri and in Quadram I was able to come up with a pipeline and the pipeline includes basically to do a phylogenetic analysis to look at the relationship of these serovas and the phylogenetic relationship of these serovas so I first had to do a QC so I had to QC all the sequencing all the reads using FastQC and then assemble the genomes using spades because most of the time the assemblies are not really up to par you have to do some QCs on them so I was able to do all QCs and then we found out that three of the samples had very large genomes compared to the normal salmonella so we had to remove those because then probably the potential contaminants we screen for viral genes antimicrobial resistant genes as well as plasmid genes and from all the samples so we also construct a phylogenetic tree using Slippy so we're able to use the core genome alignment then I've constructed using IQ3 and then annotate using ITO so we used Aurora to do to look at the plant genome and the core genome analysis of all our samples so basically that was kind of the pipeline that I've used to look at the genomes from the salmonella samples. Okay good sounds like a tried and tested a reliable workflow and so based off that what were some of the key findings out of all of this work? Overall when we look at it so we found out that there were a lot of non-typhoid salmonella that is not typhimidium that kind of overtook the whole show so we had about 60 or more percent of those synovas not typhimidium and entered this so we are really that was a bit surprising because we know previously a study was done in the same setting by Nurudin that most of the synovas that were causing invasive disease were entreated and followed by typhimidium so and then the other synovas that were not typhimidium entreated contributed only a little but what we found here was the river so we found more of the synovas they're not typhimidium entreated and typhoid and also what we found that was really interesting is that there was high fatality rate or mortality rate that we are associated with these synovas if you compare the different synovas that we have what we saw was that most of the mortality of people that died due to infection of salmonella were actually from these synovas that we call in our people atp cover and one of the things when we look at the genome what we found was that there was this particular gene that was really common in our in those synovas that we're talking about and it's called the cytolytal and distended toxin gene so actually the gene was known to be only harbored by typhi which is a human specific synova and it's also known to be to contribute to its pathogenicity what we saw was that majority of our samples more than 60 percent which are not typhimidium entities or typhi we actually need harboring this gene so in that sense we kind of speculate that this particular gene could be contributing to what we are seeing i think i'll throw in a reviewer three kind of question here i mean is any of these trends due to perhaps differences in the sample collection over different years was the number of samples total number of samples per year more or less consistent can these results be explained by some sort of sample bias or something like that and abdelay or grant if you want to comment yeah i can just comment on the rate of blood cultures from year to year you know that does change because you don't have a selected number that you do every year you have to attend to each child that comes into the surveillance system and it's generally related to the rainfall and malaria prevalence if you have a heavy rainfall year you get more malaria you get more respiratory virus activity in the wet season and you get more children coming in and you do more blood cultures so like for example the the year where we had the smallest number of blood cultures done in in children i was 2009 that was like 1900 blood cultures but then we had a flood and then we had 3500 blood cultures in 2015 so if you do more tests you will find more cases so in terms of the you know the incidence of disease or the number of cases that will change with the number of tests that you do i haven't seen any evidence though that in other settings malaria prevalence predisposes to particular serovars of non-typhoidal salmonella and usually well it's actually quite well known that the susceptibility is mainly due to neutrophil dysfunction following malaria infection which lasts for three or four months and usually neutrophil dysfunction is not going to be predisposing to one serovar over another serovar so yes we do see changes in incidence and number of cases over time but i don't see it's obviously going to be related to a change in serovar proportions over time yeah and presumably since it's driven by those factors i assume that even on years where there was low sampling or recent years with low sampling in recent years with high samplings you're still seeing a drop in enteritis and typhimurium and an increase in these other serovars yeah that's right it's been consistent for the last five years that the so-called atypical serovars are causing 60 65 percent of invasive disease yeah and you mentioned this previous study that that did not show that so when was that actually conducted relative to this one yeah that was from 2000 to 2005 in the same geographic area and the so-called atypical serovars caused about 15 percent 10 to 15 percent of the invasive disease at that time this is a reasonably rapid change over quite a few years but reasonably rapid so what has changed do you think to explain this shift our study was not designed to answer this question so our data are not ideal you know 70 or 80 percent of households have sheep or goats in them and that hasn't changed over seven years poultry ownership is 80 or 90 percent in different in the households in the study area that hasn't changed we don't see a lot of pig production in our area i think the domestic animal data that we have are really capturing the main domestic animal use in the area i think malnutrition prevalence has not changed we have good data on that hiv is definitely a risk factor for invasive nts that has not changed in terms of its prevalence it's actually very low prevalence maybe one or two percent that hasn't changed over time malaria incidents you know it goes up and down over time but actually malaria in general is becoming less common but as i said it's it's hard to hypothesize a biologic mechanism whereby malaria falling in prevalence or incidents would actually give you a seer of our specific risk so that's really why we went to the the bacteria to try and investigate the genomic aspects that might be associated with this change yeah so that's very interesting i also mentioned one of the things that we've observed in our data is that in 2010 and 2011 we've seen a very high peak of salmonella entry to this in our setting there was this flood that happened in 2010 and it lasted for more than two months in passe potentially there could be contaminations of waters and livestock so um and then when i look at the phylogenetic tree um realized that all the samples that were collected in 2010, 2011, actually clustered together with a very short, I mean, some of them, the branches are, you can actually see that these genomes are actually very, very related or closely related. So digging into that is my next kind of step to look at actually what is happening in 2010 and 2011. So especially on the entrances, but apparently I'm just speculating that that could be a reason why we have that spike there. Can I ask a question? Yeah, sure. You know, interested from the Salmonella experts, whether the gene that Abdullahi mentioned being identified in these atypical serovars and it possibly being related to clades, does it make sense to you that you've got quite a number of different atypical serovars which have this gene or these particular clades? And what sort of mechanisms might lead to multiple atypical serovars becoming more common? I mean, I can't see that Enteritidis and Typhimurium have some, well, I don't know, maybe we could investigate those to see whether they have lost virulence elements. So I recall when looking at this data with Abdullahi that this particular gene was very prevalent in Typhi, but then not really in all the other published genomes is very, very rarely observed, except in your atypical ones, it seemed to be everywhere. So that would suggest multiple independent introductions. I don't know what the mechanism is, but it seems to be quite an outlier, certainly in your data, and it does seem interesting. But probably the only way you could uncover the full story would be to go back into the lab and maybe do long read sequencing and just double check everything and see does it actually have some kind of influence or is it just a random thing that has happened and we're not looking at the real thing, we're looking at something else? I can imagine that if you have a genomic change that provides some advantage for transmission or adherence or virulence, that because the niche of the gut is only a certain size, that might then, if it does have advantages, it might displace the other cerevals. And I think, is it, Abdoulaye, your investigation into the activity of this gene, you found that it was associated with adherence and colonization as well as virulence, wasn't it? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what is mobilizing the CDT, the cytolethal distending toxin in these different cerevals. I should point out for the listeners that the cerevals are very distinct as far as the population structure of salmonella is concerned they are pretty much, they're all salmonella enterica, but that's about it. The split would go back to the central split of all salmonella. So these are, I think the major cerevals, Dublin, then things like Bredny, Miami, Softenburg, Oranienburg, Verkhov, and Dublin's a known operator to be concerned about. But most of these really aren't the canonical ones that you go after. And the fact that, yeah, we find consistently find the CDT in a lot of these probably suggests that there is some element that's being passed around that these are all acquiring and causing invasive disease. Are they passing it from each other? Probably not. It probably is something spontaneous where they are picking these up because of some selective pressure in the environment that's pushing them to pick these up. So I don't know what mobilizes CDT in this case. It could be just a recombination. It could be driven by some mobile genetic element or something like that. And I think that is where Andrew's saying that coming back with long reads and really breaking down the gene synteny and looking at how the genome structure changes between these cerevals would give us an idea of how these are actually acquiring this virulence. So there's definitely a lot more to do. I think the strong evidence that entrants in typhimurium are being replaced by other cerevals, all other things considered, is a very interesting result. It's something that I have spotted in the literature over the last couple of years that people are seeing other cerevals that are popping up. Again, it's dependent on, is it simply because we're testing more and more or not, depends in each case. But this does seem to be a trend. And then this does have an implication of if we can't just have a single target for going after enteritidis or just going after typhimurium, we have to start thinking about all Salmonella enterica or even Salmonella genus wide being an issue and being something that we have to have, something to work against at any given Salmonella. Yeah, I'd be quite concerned whether this type of phenomenon is going to spread geographically in Africa. I think there are vaccine platforms which are not CeroVar specific, like whole cell or attenuated bacterial platforms as well as outer membrane vesicles. But there's also a lot of effort being put into CeroVar specific. And I think Nabil, if you have seen trends along this in other settings as well, it may be that it's not so worthwhile pursuing those CeroVar specific strategies anymore. I mean, it's going to be a whack-a-mole kind of problem where we're going to need a multi-pronged approach to target this. Getting rid of enteritidis and getting rid of typhimurium is good. That's going to help anybody with disease burden. But yeah, I think it's just a thing of not being too narrow, not having too much tunnel vision on just those two. And it comes back to how we think about pathogens and what is a pathogen versus what is something that's quite benign. And the logic is that if you have typhi, you have a problem. If you have typhimurium and enteritidis, you have a problem. Everything else we're not bothered about. That I think is an old-fashioned view and needs to change. I think pathogenesis, given the right conditions, can come from anywhere. So just to finish up, what are the next steps given your findings? My next step, I want to look at the non-sterile sites. So NTS, we now have to see samples from the global enteritic multicenter study, GEMS, which was done also in rural Gambia, Basset. So the aim is to look at those serovas too, and then probably compare it to what we have from the pneumococcal surveillance study. So those samples we have not sequenced yet. So I think it will be important to look at those serovas because these are coming from the gut. And then they have cases and controls. So it will be important to have a look at those serovas. I'm also thinking of doing a microbiome analysis to assess what's going on during salmonella infections. So if we have that stool samples coming from the GEMS study, it would also be an important thing to look at. And host genetic factors as well as environment. So including the domestic animals. So we probably want to go and check what is happening at the domestic level. The serovas that we're talking about, probably they're coming from the food that we're eating or perhaps from the environment. So it's something that I'm thinking about. And I think, Graeme, if you agree, this is one of the things that I think might help us know where these things are coming from. And also I hear you're looking for a PhD as well. So I'm sure if anyone listening has any positions that would be suitable, they should get in touch with Mir and Nabil or with you directly. Grant, anything you want to add following that? No, I think it would be important to just understand more about this gene. I think it would be worthwhile to look at the case fatality in the NTS cases where this gene is present and not present just to see whether the case fatality is truly associated with that gene in specific, specifically. And I would just encourage other investigators in West Africa to be looking at their serovar distributions in invasive NTS to be monitoring for this type of phenomenon. Okay. And so I think at that point we'll wrap up. So that's all the time we have. for this episode. We've been talking about invasive non-typhoidal salmonella in rural Gambia, and much of what we've been talking about will be available in a preprint if you want to learn more. So I'd like to thank our guests, Grant and Abdulleh, and I'll see you next time on the MicroPinfey podcast. Thank you all so much for listening to us at home. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and like us on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, or the platform of your choice. And if you don't like this podcast, please don't do anything. This podcast was recorded by the Microbial Bioinformatics Group and edited by Nick Waters. The opinions expressed here are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CDC or the Quadrant Institute.