title: Efficacy of two DNA fingerprinting methods for typing Acinetobacter baumannii isolates.
abstract: Performance of macrorestriction and repetitive extragenic palindromic DNA sequence-based PCR (REP-PCR) to type Acinetobacter baumannii isolates was quantitatively estimated using a test population of 54 outbreak-related, 29 endemic infection-related and 17 epidemiologically-unrelated isolates. Reproducibility and stability for macrorestriction were 100%, and REP-PCR showed only slightly lower stability. Macrorestriction resolved 18 fingerprints and REP-PCR 10 DNA patterns, forming eight and seven clusters at 75% of similarity level, respectively. Intercluster band variation was > 7 bands for both methods. Although, all endemic isolates, except one, were concordantly grouped by both methods, macrorestriction distinguished a greater number of subtypes over one year study. For outbreaks, the epidemiologic concordance for both methods was 88%. The discriminatory index for macrorestriction and REP-PCR was 0.884 and 0.877, respectively. In conclusion, both methods showed similar efficacy as epidemiological markers, and by concordance, this study demonstrated that for REP-PCR typing, a > or = 7 bands difference seemed an appropriate threshold to identify unrelated strains.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Microbiología, Parasitología e Inmunología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: L S
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Quelle
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Catalano
mesh_terms: D000150:Acinetobacter / Q000145:classification* / Q000302:isolation & purification; D015373:Bacterial Typing Techniques / Q000379:methods; D003428:Cross Infection / Q000382:microbiology*; D016172:DNA Fingerprinting / Q000379:methods; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000032:analysis*; D006801:Humans; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity
chemical_list: D004269:DNA, Bacterial