The abstract is read at the publisher; the summary is JClub's.
SKA resolves finer relatedness within vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium ST117/CT71 than cgMLST, and outbreak isolates show a median allelic difference of 1 across 138 clusters.
- Why it matters: Outbreak analysis for prevalent VREfm lineages is difficult because existing cgMLST cutoffs are not well validated, risking misclassification of transmission-linked isolates.
- What they did: The study evaluated cgMLST and split k-mer analysis (SKA) on 2,505 genomes and then quantified within-cluster allelic variation using 138 outbreak clusters from 96 hospitals.
- The result: Transmission-associated isolates had compressed allelic differences (90% of pairwise comparisons within ≤9 alleles), implying the ≤20-allele threshold can overestimate relatedness and supporting a ≤9 alert threshold followed by SKA.
The findingWhy it mattersWhat they didThe result
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