Sarah Cameron from the University of Bath presented at London Calling 2024 a short session with the title “100 years of Bordetella pertussis evolution in the UK.” They noted that we have had a vaccine for Bordetella for decades and it changed to an acellular version in 2001. The genome of this organism varies through deletion and other adaptations. The goal of this project was to take 198 strains and sequence them. These strains were from the UK health services. The team sequenced all the genomes and assembled them into single contigs. The genome was very well conserved among these strains except for one region. The region of difference “D” is almost exclusively found in strains from the older era of vaccines. Cameron concluded that this region of difference may be important for growth and may have been lost in the newer strains. The research team is now reintroducing this region into strains to analyze its function. I thought this session was a great example of the power of using sequencing to learn about vaccine resistance by this microbe.
