Identification of Virulence Markers and Phylogenetic Groups’ Association, and Antimicrobial Susceptibility of Uropathogenic Escherichia coli Isolates

Background: Urinary tract infections represent a world public health problem, which is caused mainly by Uropathogenic Escherichia coli. Although they are originally found in the intestinal microbiota in the majority of the cases, urinary tract infections can also be caused by intra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli. Objective: The main objective of our research is to identify the virulence factors generally associated with different pathotypes across phylogenetic groups. Methods: E. coli were isolated from patients with urinary tract infections. Antimicrobial susceptibility tests, virulence genes and phylogroups were prospected. The data analysis were performed using the chi-square and Fisher exact test. Results: In total, 72.2% of isolates showed multidrug resistant. We have also depicted an important association between E. coli from inpatients with UTIs and pap and hlyA genes (p-0.041 and p-0.019 respectively). The predominant phylogenetic group in our isolates is B2 (45.4%) followed by D (12.4%). Our results showed that 9.3% of isolates have an unknown phylogroup which shows a significant association with astA gene (p-0.008). We have as well found a significant association between B2 and three virulence genes namely pap, hlyA and invE (p-0.002, p-0.001, p-0.025 respectively); B1 and pap, hlyA genes (p-0.049 and p-0.021 respectively); E and afa gene (p-0.024). Conclusion: Certain virulence factors have been shown to be potential targets for drug design and therapeutic pathways in order to deal with the antimicrobial resistance problem enhanced by antibiotic therapy.