Retrospective Analysis of the Relationship between Two Anthrax Outbreaks in Kazakhstan Based on Genomic Data

Alexandr Shevtsov; Gilles Vergnaud; Asylulan Amirgazin; Larissa Lukhnova; Uinkul Izbanova; Vladislav Shevtsov; Yerlan Ramankulov

doi:10.1128/MRA.01126-20

Retrospective Analysis of the Relationship between Two Anthrax Outbreaks in Kazakhstan Based on Genomic Data

Microbiol Resour Announc. 2020 Dec 10;9(50):e01126-20. doi: 10.1128/MRA.01126-20.

Authors

Alexandr Shevtsov¹, Gilles Vergnaud², Asylulan Amirgazin³, Larissa Lukhnova⁴, Uinkul Izbanova⁴, Vladislav Shevtsov³, Yerlan Ramankulov^{3

5}

Affiliations

¹ National Center for Biotechnology, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan ncbshevtsov@gmail.com.
² Université Paris-Saclay, Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC), Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
³ National Center for Biotechnology, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan.
⁴ M. Aikimbayev's National Scientific Center for Especially Dangerous Infections, Almaty, Kazakhstan.
⁵ School of Science and Technology, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan.

Abstract

We present a retrospective analysis of strains from two anthrax outbreaks in western Kazakhstan in 2009. The outbreaks occurred during the same period and in the same area located close to main roads, favoring a single source of infection. However, multilocus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis (MLVA), canonical single-nucleotide polymorphism (CanSNP) analysis, and genome-wide analysis demonstrated that the outbreaks were not connected.