SaLTy: a novel Lineage Typer.

asymptomatically colonises 30 % of humans but can also cause a range of diseases, which can be fatal. In 2017 . was associated with 20 000 deaths in the USA alone. Dividing isolates into smaller sub-groups can reveal the emergence of distinct sub-populations with varying potential to cause infections. Despite multiple molecular typing methods categorising such sub-groups, they do not take full advantage of genome sequences when describing the fundamental population structure of the species. In this study, we developed Lineage Typing (SaLTy), which rapidly divides the species into 61 phylogenetically congruent lineages. Alleles of three core genes were identified that uniquely define the 61 lineages and were used for SaLTy typing. SaLTy was validated on 5000 genomes and 99.12 % (4956/5000) of isolates were assigned the correct lineage. We compared SaLTy lineages to previously calculated clonal complexes (CCs) from BIGSdb (=21 173). SALTy improves on CCs by grouping isolates congruently with phylogenetic structure. SaLTy lineages were further used to describe the carriage of Staphylococcal chromosomal cassette containing (SCC) which is carried by methicillin-resistant (MRSA). Most lineages had isolates lacking SCC and the four largest lineages varied in SCC over time. Classifying isolates into SaLTy lineages, which were further SCC typed, allowed SaLTy to describe high-level MRSA epidemiology. We provide SaLTy as a simple typing method that defines phylogenetic lineages (https://github.com/LanLab/SaLTy). SaLTy is highly accurate and can quickly analyse large amounts of genome data. SaLTy will aid the characterisation of populations and ongoing surveillance of sub-groups that threaten human health.