BioProject

Trachoma, caused by Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct), is the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness. More...

Trachoma, caused by Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct), is the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness. Reduction of transmission of Ct is crucial to maintaining a low risk of blindness from trachoma. The key routes of transmission are thought to be mechanical transmission of infectious oculo-nasal secretions by fingers, fomites and eye-seeking flies, particularly of the Musca genus, however, these routes of transmission are poorly understood and current guidelines for interrupting them have a weak evidence base. The Stronger-SAFE study is a Wellcome-funded programme of research which aims to use a multi-disciplinary approach to identifying routes of transmission, develop interventions to interrupt them and then deploy these interventions for evaluation in a clinical trial. A key component of the study is to investigate the genetic epidemiology of Ct in infected children, fingers, fomites and flies. The aims of this project which relate to sequencing are: (i) Determine the similarity of Ct strains found in extra-ocular sites (face, hands, fomites and flies) to Ct strains recovered from the eyelids of infected individuals through whole genome and targeted typing region amplicon sequencing. (ii) Use non-targeted metagenomic sequencing methods to identify whether facial cleanliness and/or mass drug administration interventions cause changes in microbial communities at the conjunctival mucosa and their role in the pathogenesis of trachoma. This data is part of a pre-publication release. For information on the proper use of pre-publication data shared by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (including details of any publication moratoria), please see http://www.sanger.ac.uk/datasharing/ Less...