Machine learning approaches for the identification and analysis of enterotoxin genes in Staphylococcus aureus genomes (opens in new tab)

Staphylococcus aureus produces a broad range of enterotoxins that act as superantigens, disrupting host immune responses and resulting in a myriad of clinical symptoms. However, large-scale analyses determining enterotoxin gene diversity, lineage structure and isolate metadata remain scarce. We analysed 15,887 S. aureus RefSeq genomes using a machine learning pipeline combining profile Hidden Markov Model-based enterotoxin gene identification, lineage typing, gene profile-based strain cluster...