Methods The usefulness of spa-typing, pulse-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and automated repetitive extragenic palindromic sequence-based (rep-PCR) method (DiversiLab, Bacterial Barcodes, Inc.) for typing Finnish MRSA strains was studied. A total of 110 clinical MRSA isolates collected from well-defined outbreaks in Ostrobothnia region and 96 isolates from several epidemics or sporadic source...

The selective pressures leading to the evolution and maintenance of virulence in the case of facultative pathogens are quite unclear. For example, Escherichia coli, a commensal of the gut of warm-blooded animals and humans, can cause severe extraintestinal diseases, such as septicemia and meningitis, which represent evolutionary dead ends for the pathogen as they are associated to rapid host de...

In order to understand the population structure and dynamics of bacterial microorganisms, typing systems that accurately reflect the phylogenetic and evolutionary relationship of the agents are required. Over the past 15 years multilocus sequence typing schemes have replaced single locus approaches, giving novel insights into phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships of many bacterial species...

Identification of bacterial strains by DNA fingerprinting facilitates epidemiologic studies and improves disease control. For some species of organisms, no typing method is available; for others, typing methods are tedious. We developed a method of amplifying DNA sequences flanking infrequent restriction sites by PCR and used the method to produce strain-specific electrophoretic patterns from c...

An automatic tool is developed to identify microbiological data types using computer-vision and statistical modeling techniques. In bacteriophage (phage) typing, representative profiles of bacterial types are extracted. Currently, systems rely on the subjective reading of the profiles by a human expert. This process is time-consuming and prone to errors. The statistical methodology presented in...

Sinorhizobium meliloti growth inside infection threads was monitored after inoculation of alfalfa with red- or green-tagged bacteria. Most threads were populated with single bacterial types. Mixed infections were present but gave mixed nodules less often than expected. These patterns are explained by a model describing bacterial growth during infection.

Spotted fever caused by spotted fever group rickettsiae (SFGR) is found throughout China. During 2007-2008, 28 human SFGR isolates and 34 rat SFGR isolates including 15 isolates from Rattus fulvescens, 5 isolates from R. edwardsi, 7 isolates from Callosciurus erythraeus roberti and 7 isolates from Dremomys rufigenis) were obtained from L929 cell culture. Previous research indicated that the 62 ...

The first mycobacteriophage was isolated in 1947, and since that time over 250 of these viruses have been identified. Phages have made a significant contribution to our knowledge of mycobacteria over the past fifty years, and following the development of typing techniques in the 1960s and 1970s they were widely used in epidemiological studies of tuberculosis. Unfortunately, attempts to use lyti...