Genomic epidemiology in : Moving beyond traditional typing techniques.

is a bacterial gram-positive pathogen that causes invasive infections in swine and is also a zoonotic disease agent. Traditional molecular typing techniques such as ribotyping, multilocus sequence typing, pulse-field gel electrophoresis, or randomly amplified polymorphic DNA have been used to investigate population structure, evolution, and genetic relationships and support epidemiological and virulence investigations. However, these traditional typing techniques do not fully reveal the genetically heterogeneous nature of strains. The high-resolution provided by whole-genome sequencing (WGS), which is now more affordable and more commonly available in research and clinical settings, has unlocked the exploration of genetics at full resolution, permitting the determination of population structure, genetic diversity, identification of virulent clades, genetic markers, and other bacterial features of interest. This approach will likely become the new gold standard for strain typing as WGS instruments become more widely available and traditional typing techniques are gradually replaced.