Clonal diversity of Neisseria meningitidis from a population of asymptomatic carriers

Genetic diversity and relationships among 109 isolates of Neisseria meningitidis obtained from throat cultures of healthy individuals in Norway in 1984 were assessed by analyzing electrophoretically demonstrable allelic variation at 15 enzyme-encoding chromosomal genes. Seventy-eight distinctive electrophoretic types (ETs), representing multilocus genotypes, were identified. The mean genetic diversity per locus among the 78 ETs (0.538) was equivalent to that among 19 ETs represented by 66 isolates collected from patients with meningococcal disease in Norway in the first 5 months of 1984. The clonal composition of the collection of carrier strains was, however, quite different from that of strains from patients. The two groups of clones, the ET-5 complex and the ET-37 complex, that were responsible for 91% of the cases of systemic disease in Norway in 1984 were identified in only 7 and 9%, respectively, of the throat cultures from healthy individuals, and their frequencies in the human population sampled were only 0.7% for clones of the ET-5 complex and 0.9% for those of the ET-37 complex. The complex of clones that was most frequently represented by isolates from carriers (19%) has never been recovered from patients with meningococcal disease in Norway or elsewhere, which suggests that these clones have a low virulence potential. Children attending the same day care center or school seldom harbored the same clone in their throats.