About the Authors

Anna Carannante

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department Infectious Diseases, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy

Cecilia Fazio

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department Infectious Diseases, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy

Arianna Neri

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department Infectious Diseases, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy

Florigio Lista

Roles Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Scientific Department, Army Medical Center, Rome, Italy

Silvia Fillo

Roles Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Scientific Department, Army Medical Center, Rome, Italy

Andrea Ciammaruconi

Roles Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Scientific Department, Army Medical Center, Rome, Italy

Paola Vacca

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department Infectious Diseases, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy

Paola Stefanelli

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

paola.stefanelli@iss.it

Affiliation Department Infectious Diseases, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy

Competing Interests

Competing interests with Pfizer is financial since I received an unrestricted research grant number W78 (as an internal ISS code for this project) to perform molecular characterization of meningococcal of serogroup B strains from 2014 to 2017. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.