TY - JOUR
T1 - Bacterial colonization and succession in a newly opened hospital
AU - Lax, Simon
AU - Sangwan, Naseer
AU - Smith, Daniel
AU - Larsen, Peter
AU - Handley, Kim M.
AU - Richardson, Miles
AU - Guyton, Kristina
AU - Krezalek, Monika
AU - Shogan, Benjamin D.
AU - Defazio, Jennifer
AU - Flemming, Irma
AU - Shakhsheer, Baddr
AU - Weber, Stephen
AU - Landon, Emily
AU - Garcia-Houchins, Sylvia
AU - Siegel, Jeffrey
AU - Alverdy, John
AU - Knight, Rob
AU - Stephens, Brent
AU - Gilbert, Jack A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Authors, some rights reserved;.
PY - 2017/5/24
Y1 - 2017/5/24
N2 - Themicroorganisms that inhabit hospitals may influence patient recovery and outcome, although the complexity and diversity of these bacterial communities can confound our ability to focus on potential pathogens in isolation. To develop a community-level understanding of how microorganisms colonize and move through the hospital environment, we characterized the bacterial dynamics among hospital surfaces, patients, and staff over the course of 1 year as a new hospital became operational. The bacteria in patient rooms, particularly on bedrails, consistently resembled the skin microbiota of the patient occupying the room. Bacterial communities on patients and room surfaces became increasingly similar over the course of a patient's stay. Temporal correlations in community structure demonstrated that patients initially acquired room-associated taxa that predated their stay but that their own microbial signatures began to influence the room community structure over time. The α- and β-diversity of patient skin samples were only weakly or nonsignificantly associated with clinical factors such as chemotherapy, antibiotic usage, and surgical recovery, and no factor except for ambulatory status affected microbial similarity between the microbiotas of a patient and their room. Metagenomic analyses revealed that genes conferring antimicrobial resistance were consistently more abundant on room surfaces than on the skin of the patients inhabiting those rooms. In addition, persistent unique genotypes of Staphylococcus and Propionibacteriumwere identified. Dynamic Bayesian network analysis suggested that hospital staff weremore likely to be a source of bacteria on the skin of patients than the reverse but that there were no universal patterns of transmission across patient rooms.
AB - Themicroorganisms that inhabit hospitals may influence patient recovery and outcome, although the complexity and diversity of these bacterial communities can confound our ability to focus on potential pathogens in isolation. To develop a community-level understanding of how microorganisms colonize and move through the hospital environment, we characterized the bacterial dynamics among hospital surfaces, patients, and staff over the course of 1 year as a new hospital became operational. The bacteria in patient rooms, particularly on bedrails, consistently resembled the skin microbiota of the patient occupying the room. Bacterial communities on patients and room surfaces became increasingly similar over the course of a patient's stay. Temporal correlations in community structure demonstrated that patients initially acquired room-associated taxa that predated their stay but that their own microbial signatures began to influence the room community structure over time. The α- and β-diversity of patient skin samples were only weakly or nonsignificantly associated with clinical factors such as chemotherapy, antibiotic usage, and surgical recovery, and no factor except for ambulatory status affected microbial similarity between the microbiotas of a patient and their room. Metagenomic analyses revealed that genes conferring antimicrobial resistance were consistently more abundant on room surfaces than on the skin of the patients inhabiting those rooms. In addition, persistent unique genotypes of Staphylococcus and Propionibacteriumwere identified. Dynamic Bayesian network analysis suggested that hospital staff weremore likely to be a source of bacteria on the skin of patients than the reverse but that there were no universal patterns of transmission across patient rooms.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019993393&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1126/scitranslmed.aah6500
DO - 10.1126/scitranslmed.aah6500
M3 - Article
C2 - 28539477
AN - SCOPUS:85019993393
SN - 1946-6234
VL - 9
JO - Science Translational Medicine
JF - Science Translational Medicine
IS - 391
ER -