BACKGROUND The pneumococcus is a diverse pathogen whose primary niche is the nasopharynx. Over 90 different serotypes exist, and nasopharyngeal carriage of multiple serotypes is common. Understanding pneumococcal carriage is essential for evaluating the impact of pneumococcal vaccines. Traditional serotyping methods are cumbersome and insufficient for detecting multiple serotype carriage, and t...

All currently available vaccines against Streptococcus pneumoniae are based on selections of the over 90 different serotypes, which underlines the importance of serotyping for surveillance and vaccine efficacy monitoring. In this study, we modified and validated a PCR-based scheme for deducing the serotypes of the invasive pneumococci isolated in Finland. For validation, 170 isolates were serot...

Salmonella serotyping remains the gold-standard tool for the classification of Salmonella isolates and forms the basis of Canada's national surveillance program for this priority foodborne pathogen. Public health officials have been increasingly looking toward whole genome sequencing (WGS) to provide a large set of data from which all the relevant information about an isolate can be mined. Howe...

A panel of 18 strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, known to be temporally and geographically diverse, was used to evaluate a number of typing systems, including conventional auxotyping and serotyping and the molecular methods of arbitrarily primed PCR (AP-PCR), amplified ribosomal-DNA restriction analysis (ARDRA), opa typing, and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). The discriminatory power of...

Two new methods for typing Clostridium difficile, immunoblotting and plasmid fingerprinting, were compared with serotyping and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE). Of these methods, immunoblotting was found to be the most valuable for use in a comprehensive typing system. More groups could be distinguished by immunoblotting than by serotyping or PAGE. Immunoblotting results were also more...

In the present study, the RIBA HCV serotyping SIA was evaluated with a cohort of injecting drug users. Serotyping may be a rapid and cost-effective method of determining genotypes in cohort studies. In this study, hepatitis C virus (HCV) antibody-positive sera from a cohort of 331 chronically infected injecting drug users, of which 167 were coinfected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), we...