As the new technology of whole genome sequencing (WGS) has been shown to have greater discriminatory power in differentiating strains than the much-used pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), there is currently a transition from using PFGE to WGS for disease outbreak investigation. Therefore, there is a need for comparison of bacterial isolates using both PFGE and WGS. In this study, two pairs of L. monocytogenes strains with geographically diverse sources of isolation but which had indistinguishable or closely related PFGE profiles, were subjected to WGS analysis. Comparative analysis of their genomes showed that one pair of strains which had closely related PFGE profiles in fact differed significantly from one another in terms of their antibiotic and heavy metal stress resistance determinants, and mobile genetic elements. Therefore, this research demonstrated the ability of WGS analysis to differentiate very closely related strains and that WGS analysis represents the most effective tool available for subtyping L. monocytogenes isolates.

由于全基因组测序（WGS）的新技术已显示出比普遍使用的脉冲场凝胶电泳（PFGE）在区分菌株中具有更大的区分能力，因此目前存在从使用PFGE到WGS进行疾病暴发调查的过渡。因此，需要比较使用PFGE和WGS的细菌分离物。在这项研究中，两对单核细胞增生李斯特菌对具有地理上不同来源的分离株但PFGE谱没有区别或密切相关的菌株进行WGS分析。对它们基因组的比较分析表明，一对具有PFGE密切相关特征的菌株实际上在抗生素和重金属抗药性决定因素以及可移动遗传元件方面彼此之间存在显着差异。因此，这项研究证明了WGS分析具有区分非常密切相关的菌株的能力，并且WGS分析代表了可用于对L进行亚型分型的最有效工具。单核细胞增生菌分离物。