Typing methods for discriminating different bacterial isolates of the same species are essential epidemiological tools in infection prevention and control. Traditional typing systems based on phenotypes, such as serotype, biotype, phage-type, or antibiogram, have been used for many years. However, more recent methods that examine the relatedness of isolates at a molecular level have revolutioni...

Phage typing has been the traditional strain typing (or .fingerprinting.) method used in Australia for surveillance of common salmonella serovars (such as Salmonella Typhimurium) and outbreak investigations. The need for more accessible, discriminatory and objective methods has been recognised but, until now, none has been widely accepted. Recently, the molecular typing method, known as MLVA (m...

Discriminatory powers of various molecular techniques were evaluated for typing of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolated in Siriraj Hospital, Bangkok, Thailand. Thirty MRSA isolates were randomly selected in this study. They were characterized by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, ClaI-mecA and ClaI-Tn554 polymorphisms, ribotyping, and PCR-based methods including SCCmec typ...

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...

Nosocomial infections are an important source of morbidity and mortality in hospital settings, afflicting an estimated 2 million patients in United States each year. This number represents up to 5% of hospitalized patients and results in an estimated 88,000 deaths and 4.5 billion dollars in excess health care costs. Increasingly, hospital-acquired infections with multidrug-resistant pathogens r...

A recent advance in molecular typing for tracing the transmission of leprosy is the discovery of short tandem repeats (STRs) in Mycobacterium leprae. To substantiate polymorphic loci from STR as promising candidates for molecular typing tools in leprosy epidemiology, 44 STR loci including 33 microsatellites and 11 minisatellites were investigated among 27 laboratory strains by sequencing PCR pr...

Control and preventive measures for gonococcal infections are based on precise epidemiological characteristics of N. gonorrhoeae isolates. In the present study the potential utility of opa-typing and ribotyping for molecular epidemiological study of consecutive gonococcal strains was determined. Sixty gonococcal isolates were subjected to ribotyping with two restriction enzymes, AvaII and HincI...

BACKGROUND The genetic diversity of Mycoplasma agalactiae (MA) isolates collected in Spain from goats in an area with contagious agalactia (CA) was assessed using a set of validated and new molecular typing methods. Validated methods included pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) typing, and Southern blot hybridization using a set of MA DNA probes, in...