Abstract
Klebsiella pneumoniae is a priority pathogen for the development of novel therapeutic and prophylactic measures such as vaccines and monoclonal antibody therapies. Key molecular targets include the polysaccharide capsule, which protects K. pneumoniae from phagocytosis and serum bactericidal activity, and is highly immunogenic. A total of 77 distinct serological phenotypes have been defined but more than 160 different capsule polysaccharides are predicted based on analysis of the corresponding capsule (K) biosynthesis loci from whole genome sequences (WGS). These loci form the basis for WGS-based capsule typing with the computational tool, Kaptive, enabling capsule epidemiology investigations at scale to inform vaccine design. However, to-date limited data has been available with which to assess the accuracy of Kaptive for phenotype inference.
Here we present a preliminary analysis of 731 matched serological and genomic K-type calls, and show that 84.5% of the serotypes are concordant with genomic predictions, supporting use of Kaptive for seroepidemiology analyses. Ongoing work will expand the dataset, investigate genotype-phenotype discrepancies and update Kaptive to further improve its accuracy.
Full Technical Report：https://zenodo.org/records/15742130
