Genomic characterization of four Escherichia coli strains isolated from oral lichen planus biopsies

ABSTRACT

Oral lichen planus (OLP) is a chronic T cell-mediated inflammatory disease that affects the mucus membrane of the oral cavity. We previously proposed a potential role of intracellular bacteria detected within OLP lesions in the pathogenesis of OLP and isolated four Escherichia coli strains from OLP tissues that were phylogenetically close to K-12 MG1655 strain. We sequenced the genomes of the four OLP-isolated E. coli strains and generated 6.71 Gbp of Illumina MiSeq data (166–195x coverage per strain). The size of the assembled draft genomes was 4.69 Mbp, with a GC content of 50.7%, in which 4360 to 4367 protein-coding sequences per strain were annotated. We also identified 368 virulence factors and 53 antibiotic resistance genes. Comparative genomics revealed that the OLP-isolated strains shared more pangenome orthologous groups with pathogenic strains than did the K-12 MG1655 strain, a derivative of K-12 strain isolated from human feces. Although the OLP-isolated strains did not have the major virulence factors (VFs) of the pathogenic strains, a number of VFs involved in adherence/invasion, colonization, or systemic infection were identified. The genomic characteristics of E. coli first isolated from the oral cavity would benefit future investigations on the pathogenic potential of these bacteria.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral lichen planus
• Escherichia coli
• whole genome
• comparative genomics
• virulence factor
• antibiotic resistance

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea under grants 2016R1E1A1A01942402 and 2019R1A2B5B02100662.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interests.

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Funding

This work was supported by the the National Research Foundation of Korea [2016R1E1A1A01942402 and 2019R1A2B5B02100662].