“…CEM was first reported in 1977 in the United Kingdom and Ireland among Thoroughbred horses (Crowhurst, 1977;Timoney et al, 1977), but is currently a worldwide concern in various equine breeds (Jeoung et al, 2016;Schulman et al, 2013) with the hypothesis that the episodic "source of contagion" is often mainland Europe (Schulman et al, 2013). Pulsedfield gel electrophoresis (Aalsburg and Erdman, 2011;Sting et al, 2016) and several other molecular typing tools including field inversion gel electrophoresis (Bleumink-Pluym et al, 1990), chromosomal DNA fingerprinting (Thoresen et al, 1995), crossed-field gel electrophoresis (Miyazawa et al, 1995) and more recently repetitive extragenic palindromic PCR (Sting et al, 2016) have been used to genotype CEM isolates. However, these molecular epidemiological tools are not very portable and inter-laboratory results are difficult to compare (Maiden et al, 1998), making them ill-suited for global epidemiological studies of 5 CEM outbreaks.…”