European efforts to harmonize typing of meningococci

Abstract

Neisseria meningitidis causes life-threatening disease in infants, toddlers, and adolescents. Besides representative case notification, public health management of the disease requires bacterial typing information. European reference laboratories and state epidemiologists in collaboration with European institutions have driven forward the harmonization of typing by rigorously adopting DNA sequence typing and using common reference databases. External quality assessment has been provided by supranational networks, i.e. EU-IBIS and IBD-Labnet. The recent development of novel protein-based vaccines targeting serogroup B strains highlights the necessity to complement standard typing schemes by specific vaccine antigen typing including antigen expression analysis. Although not yet feasible for routine application on hundreds of strains, novel database structures have been developed to accommodate deep sequencing data.