Strain typing is an integral part of epidemiological investigations of bacterial infections. Typing methods fall into two broad categories: phenotypic and genotypic methods. Phenotypic methods are those that characterize the products of gene expression in order to differentiate strains. Properties such as biochemical profiles, antimicrobial susceptibility profiles, bacteriophage types, and anti...

Typing of group A Streptococcus (GAS) is crucial for infection control and epidemiology. While whole-genome sequencing (WGS) is revolutionizing the way that bacterial organisms are typed, it is necessary to provide backward compatibility with currently used typing schemas to facilitate comparisons and understanding of epidemiological trends. Here, we sequenced the genomes of 191 GAS isolates re...

Staphylococcus aureus is an important pathogen involved in subclinical bovine mastitis, causing high economic losses for the dairy industry. The successful persistence of this host occurs due to a series factors associated with colonization ability and acquisition virulence factors. This bacterial species carries genetic heterogeneity, genetically diverse strains characterize population. Analys...

INTRODUCTION Rapid, reliable and accurate molecular typing methods are essential for outbreaks detection and infectious diseases control, for monitoring the evolution and dynamics of microbial populations, and for effective epidemiological surveillance. The introduction of a novel method based on the analysis of melting temperature of amplified products, known as High Resolution Melting (HRM) s...

Many bacterial typing methods are specific for one species only, time-consuming, or poorly reproducible. DiversiLab (DL; bioMérieux) potentially overcomes these limitations. In this study, we evaluated the DL system for the identification of hospital outbreaks of a number bacterial species. Appropriately typed clinical isolates were tested with DL. DL typing agreed with pulsed-field gel electro...

After its emergence in 2003, a livestock-associated (LA-)MRSA clade (CC398) has caused an impressive increase in the number of isolates submitted for the Dutch national MRSA surveillance and now comprises 40% of all isolates. The currently used molecular typing techniques have limited discriminatory power for this MRSA clade, which hampers studies on the origin and transmission routes. Recently...

Staphylococcus aureus, especially methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), continues to be one of the most important bacterial pathogens in humans and is responsible for a constantly increasing number of nosocomial and community-acquired infections. Bacterial strain typing, or subspecies identification, has become an important clinical tool for investigating suspected outbreaks and evaluating no...

There have been many reports of groups of related Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains described variously as lineages, families or clades. There is no objective definition of these groupings, making it impossible to define relationships between those groups with biological advantages. Here we describe two groups of related strains obtained from an epidemiological study in Tanzania, which we defi...

PURPOSE We investigated the molecular types of uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) by using conventional phylogrouping, multilocus sequence typing (MLST), and fimH genotyping. METHODS Samples of patients younger than 18 years of age were collected from the Chung-Ang University Hospital over 2 years. Conventional phylogenetic grouping for UPEC strains was performed by polymerase chain reacti...

Anaplasma phagocytophilum is a zoonotic obligate intracellular bacterium known to be transmitted by ticks belonging to the Ixodes persulcatus complex. This bacterium can infect several mammalian species, and is known to cause diseases with variable symptoms in many domestic animals. Specifically, it is the causative agent of tick-borne fever (TBF), a disease of important economic impact in Euro...