Affiliation:
1. Laboratoire de Référence MRSA-Staphylocoques, Department of Microbiology, Hôpital Erasme, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) of genomic macrorestriction fragments has been used by the Belgian Reference Laboratory for Staphylococci for national hospital surveys of methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
since 1992. The sequencing of the polymorphic X region of the protein A gene (
spa
typing) offers significant advantages over PFGE in terms of speed, ease of interpretation, and exportability. To validate its potential use for national surveillance, we evaluated the robustness of
spa
typing compared with that of PFGE based on a collection of 217
S. aureus
strains representative of the Belgian
S. aureus
epidemiology during the last 13 years.
spa
typing and PFGE both showed high discriminatory power (discriminatory indexes of 0.98 and 0.96, respectively) and achieved high concordance (95.9%) in type classification. Both methods also showed good concordance with multilocus sequence typing (MLST) (95.5%). However, we observed occasional “violations” of MLST clonal complex assignment by
spa
typing. Our results suggest that both PFGE and
spa
typing are reliable methods for long-term, nationwide epidemiological surveillance studies. We suggest that
spa
typing, which is a single-locus-based method, should preferably be used in combination with additional markers, such as staphylococcal cassette chromosome
mec
typing or resistance or virulence gene detection.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Cited by
115 articles.
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