{"doi":"10.1128/spectrum.01990-21","title":"Comparison of Isogenic Strains Shows No Evidence of Altered Nosocomial Transmission-Competency of Rough, GPL-Negative Mycobacterium abscessus Strains","abstract":"Mycobacterium abscessus is an emerging pathogen causing severe pulmonary infections. In the clinical setting, M. abscsssus undergoes molecular and genetic changes associated with increased virulence. Specifically, bacterial defects in glycopeptidolipid (GPL) synthesis, creating the \"Rough\" colony phenotype, have been associated with increased virulence, yet were also presumably observed to have decreased survival on fomites, leading to reduced transmissibility. We set to determine whether GPL-synthesis defects are indeed responsible for reduced transmissibility of clinical isolates. We compared fully isogenic GPL-disrupted versus GPL-preserved strains, and demonstrated no survival advantage for either strain on fomites. Additionally, neither isolate had a survival advantage in chlorhexidine, a widely used disinfectant in health care settings. Our findings suggest that reduced transmissibility of clinical isolates, should it be found, cannot be attributed to GPL-synthesis mutations. While clinical isolates may show changes in transmission potential, more studies are needed to investigate the mechanisms leading to these phenotypic changes.","journal":"Microbiology Spectrum","year":2022,"id":295078,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9457,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":981110,"name":"Mark Foreman","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":913738,"name":"Michal Bar-Oz","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":981111,"name":"Noga Naor","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":981112,"name":"A. B. Rozenblit","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":913053,"name":"Daniel Barkan","orcid":"0000-0002-5691-1757","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":913052,"name":"Michal Meir","orcid":"0000-0001-9979-6552","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":16,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:05.260069Z","pmid":"35311553","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}