Журнал бактериологии и паразитологии

Абстрактный

Molecular typing of enterococci/VRE

Guido Werner

With their increasing frequency as a nosocomial pathogen and hence their increased general medical importance, the need to characterize and differentiate strains of Enterococcus faecalis and E. faecium has increased. Available methods vary in ease of use, cost, labor, and time requirements, inter- and intra-laboratory comparability and reproducibility of results, data transferability, and discriminatory power. Outbreak analysis using sophisticated molecular techniques requires methods with different discrimination than methods for detecting and tracking the transmission of epidemic strains over longer periods of time. The latter is especially important for bacteria displaying a fairly flexible genome, such as Enterococcus. The value and application of conventional typing methods for (vancomycin resistance) enterococci are discussed
, including ribotyping, PCR-based typing, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) macrorestriction analysis, amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP), multiple locus variable number tandem repeat analysis (MLVA), multilocus sequence typing (MLST), and some special approaches (resistance cluster typing, plasmid typing, next-generation sequencing).