"Until now, it has been a mystery why sometimes we see two opposing types of infection in patients who appear to have the same strain of flesh-eating bacteria," said Dr. Donald Low, chief microbiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital, medical director of the OAHPP Public Health Laboratories and one of the authors of the study. "In some cases, patients suffer from a devastating infection of tissue and muscle requiring extensive surgery. And, other patients present with a skin infection readily treated with antibiotics. Now, we understand in part why this happens."

Understanding the detailed molecular architecture of bacterial epidemics has been a long-sought goal of infectious disease research, he added. Genetics and evolution research has long been hobbled by the lack of comprehensive genome-wide markers. The recent advent of massively parallel DNA sequencing techniques now permits full-genome sequences to be generated rapidly. This opens the door to answering longstanding but previously economically unviable questions in all areas of biomedical research, including bacterial epidemics.

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