Development of databases for O- and K-antigen genotyping.

is an important food-borne human pathogen and presents immunogenic surface polysaccharides, which can be used to distinguish problematic and disease-causing lineages. is divided in 16 O-serotypes (O-antigen) and 71 K-serotypes (K-antigen). Agglutination tests are still the gold standard for serotyping, but many isolates are not typable by agglutination. An alternative for agglutination tests is genotyping using whole-genome sequencing data, by which K- and O- genotypes have been curated and identified previously for other clinically relevant organisms with the software tool . In this study, isolates were serotyped and sequenced, and all known and several novel O- and K-loci were identified. We developed databases for all O- and K-loci after manual curation of the loci. In our study, we could genotype the O- and K-loci of 98 and 93 % of the genomes, respectively, with a confidence score higher than 'none'. The newly developed databases with the identified O- and K-loci can be used to identify the O- and K-genotypes of isolates from genome sequences.