INTRODUCTION Inadequate potable water supply and poor sanitation predispose to food- and water-borne diseases associated with Salmonella enterica serovars in developing countries. In this study the possible source of an unprecedented upsurge of Salmonella-associated community gastroenteritis was traced using both phage-typing and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). METHODOLOGY Nineteen S...

Nontyphoid Salmonella is one of the main causes of bacterial gastroenteritis worldwide and is responsible for 65% of reported outbreaks of foodborne diseases in France. Serotyping is widely used for isolate preliminary identification, but it poorly discriminates strains. Rapid, efficient molecular subtyping tools have therefore been developed for the investigation of outbreaks. We evaluated the...

Strain comparison is important to population genetics and to evaluate relapses in patients with Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) lung disease, but the "gold standard" of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) is time-consuming and complex. We used variable-number tandem repeats (VNTR) for fingerprinting of respiratory isolates of M. intracellulare from patients with underlying bronchiectasis,...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE Streptococcus pneumoniae is common in ocular and systemic infections and is a part of normal nasopharyngeal flora. Very few studies regarding genetic analysis of S. pneumoniae isolates causing eye infections are available. This study was undertaken to do pulse field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) analysis and ribotyping of S. pneumoniae isolates obtained from eye infections, ...

The genetic relatedness of 127 methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates, belonging to five major types as identified by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and antibiotic resistance profiles, was examined further using phage typing and fluorescent amplified fragment length polymorphism (FAFLP). The MRSA isolates were recovered from patients at the Prince of Wales Hospital...

Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) is considered the "gold standard" for molecular typing of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). However, the method is time-consuming and expensive, and its discriminatory power may not be necessary in outbreak situations. We used a rapid multiplex PCR-based method with published primers and compared the results with those obtained by PFGE. ...

This study aimed to identify specific river sources of fecal contamination by applying pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) to environmental water samples from a recreational beach in Japan. The genotypes of all Enterococcus faecium and Enterococcus faecalis strains used as indicators of fecal pollution on the recreational beach and rivers were analyzed by PFGE, and the PFGE profiles of the ...

Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) based on the 16S RNA, pduF, glnA, and manB genes was developed for Salmonella, and its discriminatory ability was compared to those of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and serotyping. PFGE differentiated several strains undifferentiable by serotyping, and 78 distinct PFGE types were identified among 231 Salmonella isolates grouped into 22 serotypes and 1...

In a series of 116 Salmonella enterica Newport isolates that included 64 multidrug-resistant (MDR) isolates, automated ribotyping and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) discriminated MDR S. Newport with a sensitivity of 100% and 98% and specificity of 76% and 89%, respectively. Clustering of PFGE patterns (but not ribotyping) linked human and bovine cases. Automated ribotyping rapidly iden...

Monitoring the emergence and transmission of Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains among cystic fibrosis (CF) patients is important for infection control in CF centers internationally. A recently developed multilocus sequence typing (MLST) scheme is used for epidemiologic analyses of P. aeruginosa outbreaks; however, little is known about its suitability for isolates from CF patients compared with tha...