Listeriosis is a food-borne disease caused by bacterium Listeria monocytogenes. For the effective control of L. monocytogenes, it is essential to use methods that enable the detection and differentiation of this bacterium from other Listeria species in food, environmental, and clinical samples. Clinical isolates were identified as L. monocytogenes by MALDI-TOF MS and real-time PCR, both methods of choice for routine identification of pathogens in clinical settings. As advances in technology have made whole genome sequencing a key tool for routine surveillance, it was also used in our study. We identified the bacterial lineage, sequence type and clonal complex. The isolates belonged to lineages I and II, to which most clinically relevant strains belong. We also identified the main genetic determinants of virulence, as knowledge of virulence may help prevent future outbreaks of listeriosis. The main genes within LIPI-1 were present in all isolates. SSI-1 was present in sequence types 26, 155 and 224. The genes that are part of LIPI-3 were present only in lineage I, while inlG and SSI-1 were more abundant in lineage II. We detected resistance to fosfomycin in our isolates, to which L. monocytogenes is naturally resistant, and resistance to streptogramin A. In the course of our study, we obtained two similarity trees, one by FTIR and the other by cgMLST. The isolates were uniformly assigned to lineages I and II regardless of the method used.
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