Intestinal infections caused by methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) have posed a great challenge for clinical treatments. In recent years, the intestinal carriage rates of MSSA have risen steadily in hospital settings in China. However, the epidemiology and molecular characteristics of MSSA from the intestinal tracts of Chinese adult patients remain unknown. In the present study, a total of 80 S. aureus isolates, including 64 MSSA and 16 methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), were recovered from 466 fecal swabs in adult patients between 2019 and 2021 in China. The MSSA isolates exhibited high resistance to penicillin (92.2%) and erythromycin (45.3%). In addition, a higher proportion of MSSA isolates (14.1%) were multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains than that of MRSA isolates (1.3%). Among the 64 MSSA isolates, we identified 17 MLST types, of which ST398 and ST15 were the most predominant types. The most frequently detected resistance genes were blaZ (87.5%) and erm(C) (21.9%). The hemolysin genes (hla, hld, hlgA, hlgB, hlgC) were detected in all the MSSA isolates, but the Panton–Valentine leucocidin (pvl) gene was identified in 1.7% of the MSSA isolates. Our findings indicated that the prevalence and antimicrobial resistance of intestinal MSSA was a serious concern among adult patients in China.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is one of the important antibiotic resistant pathogens causing infections in humans and animals. The increasing observation of MRSA in wildlife species has raised the concern of its impact on animal health and the potential of zoonotic transmission. This study investigated the prevalence of S. aureus in fecal samples from non-human primates in a zoo located in Jiangsu, China, in which 6 out of 31 (19.4%) fecal samples, and 2 out of 14 (14.3%) indoor room floor swab samples were S. aureus-positive. The antibiotic susceptibility tests of the eight isolates showed that the two isolates were resistant to both penicillin and cefoxitin, the three isolates were resistant only to penicillin, while three isolates were susceptible to all detected antibiotics. The two isolates resistant to cefoxitin were further identified as MRSA by the presence of mecA. Five different spa types were identified including t034 of two MRSA isolates from Trachypithecus francoisi, t189 of two methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) isolates from Rhinopithecus roxellana, t377 of two MSSA isolates from Colobus guereza, and two novel spa types t19488 and t19499 from Papio anubis. Whole genome sequencing analysis showed that MRSA t034 isolates belonged to ST398 clustered in clonal complex 398 (CC398) and carried the type B ΦSa3 prophage. The phylogenetic analysis showed that the two MRSA t034/ST398 isolates were closely related to the human-associated MSSA in China. Moreover, two MRSA isolates contained the virulence genes relating to the cell adherence, biofilm formation, toxins, and the human-associated immune evasion cluster, which indicated the potential of bidirectional transfer of MRSA between monkeys and humans. This study is the first to report MRSA CC398 from monkey feces in China, indicating that MRSA CC398 could colonize in monkey and have the risk of transmission between humans and monkeys.

The monophasic variant of Salmonella Typhimurium has emerged and increased rapidly worldwide during the past two decades. The loss of genes encoding the second-phase flagella and the acquirement of the multi-drug resistance cassette are the main genomic characteristics of the S. Typhimurium monophasic variant. In this study, two Salmonella strains were isolated from the knee effusion and feces of a 4-year-old girl who presented with a case of septic arthritis and fever, respectively. Primary serovar identification did not detect the second-phase flagellar antigens of the strains using the classical slide agglutination test. Whole-genome sequencing analysis was performed to reveal that the replacement of the fljAB operon by a 4.8-kb cassette from E. coli caused the non-expression of phase-2 flagellar antigens of the strains, which were confirmed to be a novel S. Virchow monophasic variant (Salmonella 6,7,14:r:-) by core-genome multi-locus sequence typing (cgMLST). Compared to the 16 published S. Virchow genomes, the two strains shared a unique CRISPR type of VCT12, and showed a close genetic relationship to S. Virchow BCW_2814 and BCW_2815 strains, isolated from Denmark and China, respectively, based on cgMLST and CRISPR typing. Additionally, the acquisition of Salmonella genomic island 2 (SGI2) with an antimicrobial resistance gene cassette enabled the strains to be multidrug-resistant to chloramphenicol, tetracycline, trimethoprim, and sulfamethoxazole. The emergence of the multidrug-resistant S. Virchow monophasic variant revealed that whole-genome sequencing and CRISPR typing could be applied to identify the serovaraints of Salmonella enterica strains in the national Salmonella surveillance system.