As an important foodborne pathogen, Salmonella enterica serotype Enteritidis is recognized as one of the most common causes of human salmonellosis globally. Outbreak detection for this highly homogenous serotype, however, has remained challenging. Rapid advances in sequencing technologies have presented whole-genome sequencing (WGS) as a significant advancement for source tracing and molecular typing of foodborne pathogens. A retrospective analysis was conducted using Salmonella Enteritidis isolates (n = 65) from 11 epidemiologically confirmed outbreaks and a collection of contemporaneous sporadic isolates (n = 258) during 2007-2017 to evaluate the performance of WGS in delineating outbreak-associated isolates. Whole-genome single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based phylogenetic analysis revealed well-supported clades in concordance with epidemiological evidence and pairwise distances of ≤3 SNPs for all outbreaks. WGS-based framework of outbreak detection was thus proposed and applied prospectively to investigate isolates (n = 66) from nine outbreaks during 2018-2019. We further demonstrated the superior discriminatory power and accuracy of WGS to resolve and delineate outbreaks for pragmatic food source tracing. The proposed integrated WGS framework is the first in China for Salmonella Enteritidis and has the potential to serve as a paradigm for outbreak detection and source tracing of Salmonella throughout the stages of food production, as well as expanded to other foodborne pathogens.
Keywords: Salmonella enterica serotype Enteritidis; food safety; outbreak detection; single-nucleotide polymorphism; source tracing; whole-genome sequencing.