title: Usefulness of PCR melting profile method for genotyping analysis of Klebsiella oxytoca isolates from patients of a single hospital unit.
abstract: The development of rapid and simple typing methods is required in order to identify possible sources of human exposure to opportunistic pathogens. Klebsiella spp. belongs to a group of bacteria that are opportunistic pathogens responsible for an increasing number of multiresistant infections in hospitals. Recently, we showed the high genetic diversity of K. oxytoca using a large collection of strains isolated from the patients of several hospitals in Poland over a 50-year period. Our results showed that the internal transcribed spacer polymerase chain reaction method (ITS-PCR) is useful for the phylogenetic delineation of genetic groups in K. oxytoca and the high discriminatory power of the PCR melting profiles (PCR MP) method can be useful for epidemiological studies of K. oxytoca. In the present study the usefulness of PCR MP was tested on two sets of strains isolated from a single unit over a short period of time. The results revealed that PCR MP has a high discriminatory power and can be useful for epidemiological studies of closely related strains of K. oxytoca isolated from a single unit over a short period of time to identify the source, reservoirs and the tract of infection spread. The advantage of PCR MP for the above application was shown by using the procedure at increasing denaturation temperature during PCR to confirm genotyping results. Considering this feature and the high discriminatory power of PCR MP, as shown in this report for determination of the genetic similarities of consecutive K. oxytoca strains, we propose that PCR MP is one of the best techniques for short-term epidemiology analysis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology, Gdańsk University of Technology, Gdańsk, Poland.
authors.forename: Karolina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Stojowska
authors.forename: Stanisław
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kałuzewski
authors.forename: Beata
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Krawczyk
mesh_terms: D005838:Genotype; D006757:Hospital Units; D006801:Humans; D007710:Klebsiella Infections / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000382:microbiology*; D041121:Klebsiella oxytoca / Q000235:genetics*; D009691:Nucleic Acid Denaturation / Q000235:genetics*; D010802:Phylogeny; D011044:Poland / Q000453:epidemiology; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction / Q000379:methods*