Advances on whole genome sequencing-powered typing and source tracking of bacterial pathogens

Abstract:

Molecular typing has been an important technique to monitor the outbreak of bacterial infections and the transmission routes of bacterial pathogens. Improvements in the next-generation sequencing technologies are facilitating rapid and cost-effective molecular diagnosis and genotyping in identification, characterization, and source tracking of bacterial pathogens. With the advancement of microbial whole genome sequencing techniques, a large volume of bacterial genome data have been produced and deposited in public databases, which necessitate the need of a variety of bioinformatics tools to analyze and interpret these data. This review provided an overview of the whole genome sequencing-powered typing and source tracking of bacterial pathogens by various cutting-edge bioinformatics tools. We also discussed the bottleneck in the deployment of this technology in clinical practice and the future application prospects in bacterial infectious disease management.