Improving bacterial strain classification for more effective surveillance

Most bacterial species have a huge variety of strains, and antibiotic resistance, virulence and potential for transmissibility all vary from one to the next. The precise identification of these different strains is therefore a major public health challenge and is crucial for effective surveillance of infectious agents. But a taxonomy for emerging bacterial strains is still largely lacking, which complicates communication between scientists and epidemiological surveillance. In a paper published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, scientists from the Institut Pasteur propose a novel broadly applicable genomic classification approach for bacterial strains.

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