Abstract
© 2016 Future Medicine Ltd. Aim: To compare the discriminatory power of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and sequence-based typing (SBT) in Legionella outbreaks for determining the infection source. Materials & methods: Twenty-five investigations of Legionnaires' disease were analyzed by PFGE, SBT and Dresden monoclonal antibody. Results: The results suggested that monoclonal antibody could reduce the number of Legionella isolates to be characterized by molecular methods. The epidemiological concordance PFGE-SBT was 100%, while the molecular concordance was 64%. Adjusted Wallace index (AW) showed that PFGE has better discriminatory power than SBT (AWSBT→PFGE = 0.767; AWPFGE→SBT = 1). The discrepancies appeared mostly in sequence type (ST) 1, a worldwide distributed ST for which PFGE discriminated different profiles. Conclusion: SBT discriminatory power was not sufficient verifying the infection source, especially in worldwide distributed STs, which were classified into different PFGE patterns.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 757-765 |
Journal | Future Microbiology |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2016 |
Keywords
- congruence
- discriminatory power
- Legionella
- molecular-epidemiology outbreaks
- PFGE
- SBT
- typing