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Confirmation of C perfringens food poisoning depends on the isolation of large numbers (> 106/g) of the organism from faecal specimens and the subsequent demonstration of a common serological type in these and in the incriminated food. The ability of these isolates to produce enterotoxin in vitro may be of importance, but the problems associated with obtaining good sporulation and subsequent enterotoxin production in vitro are well known and make this approach unsuitable.5 An alternative approach is to show the presence of enterotoxin in faeces, and this may be particularly valuable when serological confirmation is not possible.

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Four synthetic oligonucleotides encoding different parts of the Clostridium perfringens enterotoxin gene were used to test the enterotoxigenicity of C. perfringens strains isolated from confirmed outbreaks of food poisoning. Of the 245 strains isolated from food and feces originating from 186 separate outbreaks, 145 (59%) gave hybridization reactions with each of the four DNA probes used, while 104 strains did not hybridize with any of the probes. There was no correlation between serotype and the presence of the enterotoxin gene, although the C. perfiringens enterotoxin gene was rarely detected among nontypable strains (17%). Results show that DNA hybridization is a suitable method for the identification of C. perfringens strains which have the potential to produce enterotoxin.

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