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Clostridium perfringens can cause a plethora of diseases in humans and animals, making it a growing public health concern. Insight into C. perfringens genomic studies has enhanced our understanding of the diversity and evolution of this bacterium. However, most of these studies were centered on clinical strains from human and animal hosts, with limited data from environmental sources and developing countries. Here, we present genomic and phenotypic insights into C. perfringens strains from hospital wastewater samples from Ghana. Antibiotic susceptibility testing, toxinotyping, and whole-genome sequencing were performed on the seven C. perfringens isolates. The strains were susceptible to all antibiotics screened except for three strains that were resistant to clindamycin. The majority of these strains were type F strains, characterized by a chromosomally encoded cpe gene, whereas the remaining strains were classified as type A. The cpe gene is flanked upstream by IS1469 and downstream by IS1470. The genotype for the type F strains was ST721, whereas the type A strains were assigned to ST722, ST143, and ST211. Our type F strains clustered with other strains all within phylogroup I, which are mostly associated with foodborne illnesses, whereas the type A strains were grouped within phylogroup III. This study provides the first genomic characterization of C. perfringens from West Africa and contributes to further understanding of genomic diversity in C. perfringens. Moreover, the possible disseminated situation of C. perfringens in the environment highlights the need to monitor this bacterium in clinical specimens in Ghana. IMPORTANCE Clostridium perfringens causes gas gangrene and food poisoning in humans, and monitoring this bacterium is important for public health. Although whole-genome sequencing is useful to comprehensively understand the virulence, resistome, and global genetic relatedness of bacteria, limited genomic data from environmental sources and developing countries hamper our understanding of the richness of the intrinsic genomic diversity of this pathogen. Here, we successfully accumulated the genetic data on C. perfringens strains isolated from hospital effluent and provided the first evidence that predicted pathogenic C. perfringens may be disseminated in the clinical environment in Ghana. Our findings suggest the importance of risk assessment in the environment as well as the clinical setting to mitigate the potential outbreak of C. perfringens food poisoning in Ghana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buruli ulcer is an indolent, slowly progressing necrotizing disease of the skin caused by infection with Mycobacterium ulcerans. In the present study, we applied a redesigned technique to a vast panel of M. ulcerans disease isolates and clinical samples originating from multiple African disease foci in order to (i) gain fundamental insights into the population structure and evolutionary history of the pathogen and (ii) disentangle the phylogeographic relationships within the genetically conserved cluster of African M. ulcerans. Our analyses identified 23 different African insertion sequence element single nucleotide polymorphism (ISE-SNP) types that dominate in different areas where Buruli ulcer is endemic. These ISE-SNP types appear to be the initial stages of clonal diversification from a common, possibly ancestral ISE-SNP type. ISE-SNP types were found unevenly distributed over the greater West African hydrological drainage basins. Our findings suggest that geographical barriers bordering the basins to some extent prevented bacterial gene flow between basins and that this resulted in independent focal transmission clusters associated with the hydrological drainage areas. Different phylogenetic methods yielded two well-supported sister clades within the African ISE-SNP types. The ISE-SNP types from the "pan-African clade" were found to be widespread throughout Africa, while the ISE-SNP types of the "Gabonese/Cameroonian clade" were much rarer and found in a more restricted area, which suggested that the latter clade evolved more recently. Additionally, the Gabonese/Cameroonian clade was found to form a strongly supported monophyletic group with Papua New Guinean ISE-SNP type 8, which is unrelated to other Southeast Asian ISE-SNP types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]