Purpose: The main objectives of the present study were to detect the antimicrobial susceptibility and molecular characteristics of Klebsiella pneumoniae  isolated from different hosts and to investigate the possibility of K. pneumoniae  transmission between animals and humans.
Materials and methods: A total of 189 nonduplicate K. pneumoniae  isolates were collected from hospitals and four species of animals in Henan Province, China. The disk diffusion method was used for antimicrobial susceptibility testing, and resistance and virulence genes were screened by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The molecular types were identified through multilocus sequence typing (MLST), and the hypermucoviscous (HMV) phenotype was identified using the “string-forming test”. Pearson’s parameters were used to determine the potential link among the molecular types and resistance and virulence genes of all K. pneumoniae  strains.
Results: The resistance rates of the 189 K. pneumoniae  isolates against 15 antibiotics ranged from 11.6% to 77.8%. The highest multidrug resistance rate was detected in the pig strains (93.6%), followed by the human strains (90.4%), chicken strains (88.9%), cow strains (52.0%) and sheep strains (50.0%). Forty-eight (25.4%) K. pneumoniae  strains presented the HMV phenotype. entB, fimH-1  and mrkD  were the most prevalent of the detected virulence genes, and magA  and rmpA  were the least prevalent genes in all the isolates. The MLST analysis revealed 24 unique sequence types (STs) among from the 189 isolates. ST11, ST235 and ST258 were common STs among the five isolates of host origin. ST258 exhibited significantly positive correlations with blaNDM, magA  and the HMV phenotype and a negative correlation with qnrB .
Conclusion: K. pneumoniae  strains from different hosts, including humans and animals, have common molecular types and similar phenotypes, and these strains can potentially be transmitted between humans and animals.
Keywords: K. pneumoniae , antimicrobial resistance, virulence genes, sequence types