Molecular epidemiology of vancomycin resistant enterococci collected from 9 hospitals in Beijing, China: a multicenter study.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the antibacterial susceptibility and molecular characteristics of vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) isolated from 9 hospitals in Beijing from November 2021 to October 2022.

METHODS

The susceptibilities to 17 antibacteria agents were tested using two-fold agar dilution and broth microdilution. The resistance genes were characterized through whole genome sequence analysis. The bacteria typing was investigated through multilocus sequence typing (MLST), core genome MLST(cgMLST).

RESULTS

A total of 251 VRE isolates including 247 Enterococcus faecium (VREfm) and 4 Enterococcus faecalis (VREfs) were collected in this study. More than 75% isolates were collected from urine. More than 89% isolates were resistant to teicoplanin. Besides glycopeptides, all the VRE isolates were resistant to penicillin, ampicillin and fluoroquinolones (VREfm) or erythromycin and fluoroquinolones (VREfs) and can be defined as multi-drug resistant. Among 247 VREfm, 72.9% (180/247) carried vanA gene, 0.8% (2/247) carried vanM gene, and 26.3% (65/247) carried both vanA and vanM genes. A total of 22 sequence types (STs) were identified, with ST80 (24.7%, 61/247) being the most predominant. cgMLST analysis revealed that ST80-CT8524 was the most common cluster among the VREfm isolates. All the 4 VREfs isolates harbored vanA gene and were assigned to 2 STs.

CONCLUSION

VREfm isolates belonging to ST80 in Beijing was most common. VanA was still the predominant van gene and increased coexistence of vanA and vanM was noteworthy.