Molecular typing of the pneumococcus has played a crucial role in understanding the epidemiology of the organism. However, most of what is known about molecular epidemiology of the pneumococcus pertains to the developed world. The brunt of pneumococcal infections is borne by sub-Saharan African countries, which makes epidemiological monitoring of the pneumococcus essential in this region of the...

identification  of clinically  significant  nocardia  species  is essential  for the definitive diagnosis, predict antimicrobial susceptibility, epidemiological purposes,  and  for  an  effective  treatment.   conventional   identification   of nocardia species in routine medical laboratories which is based on phenotypic (cellular morphology, colonial characteristics), biochemical and enzymatic...

1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Genotyping methods 3.1. Genetic markers 3.1.1. Insertion sequences 3.1.2. Short repetitive DNA sequences 3.2. Restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis 3.2.1. IS6110 RFLP analysis 3.2.2. PGRS RFLP analysis 3.3. PCR-based typing 3.3.1. Mixed-linker PCR 3.3.2. Spoligotyping 3.3.3. VNTR and MIRU-VNTR typing 3.4. Comparison of genotyping methods 4. Molecular e...

Background: Considering the role of HLA matching in transplant outcome, the quality of HLA-DR typing is clearly an important issue. In recent years, serological methods have been replaced with DNA based typing methods. The main objective of this study was to compare HLA-DR typing data obtained from existing serologic method with data obtained by the new PCR-SSP method. Methods: 55 peripheral bl...

Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) caused by the opportunistic fungal agent Pneumocystis jirovecii (formerly P. carinii) continues to cause illness and death in HIV-infected patients. In the absence of a culture system to isolate and maintain live organisms, efforts to type and characterize the organism have relied on polymerase chain reaction-based approaches. Studies using these methods have improv...

Four molecular approaches to determining the types of Candida albicans strains were compared. The strains used were those whose repeated DNA (ribosomal and mitochondrial) EcoRI restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLP) were determined by Stevens et al. (D. A. Stevens, F. C. Odds, and S. Scherer, Rev. Infect. Dis. 12:258-266, 1990). Scherer and Stevens (S. Scherer and D. A. Stevens, Proc....