Use of ribotyping in epidemiological surveillance of nosocomial outbreaks

Abstract

Over the past few years, genotypic methods based on the study of bacterial DNA polymorphism have shown high discriminatory power for strain differentiation and superiority over most phenotypic methods commonly available in the clinical microbiology laboratory. Some of the methods used, however, required either a high level of technology and sophisticated equipment (e.g., pulsed-field gel electrophoresis) or species-specific reagents of restricted availability (randomly cloned DNA probes or gene-specific probes). Because ribotyping uses a universal probe (rRNA) and is a rather simple technology, particularly since the advent of nonradioactive labelling systems, it has been widely used for strain differentiation of most bacterial species involved in nosocomial outbreaks. In vitro and in vivo stability of the markers studied has been demonstrated. Although there may be limitation to this approach, ribotyping was found to be highly discriminative, particularly for typing members of the family Enterobacteriaceae, Pseudomonas cepacia, and Xanthomonas maltophilia. In many cases, it has improved the understanding of the mechanism of nosocomial acquisition of organisms by allowing a distinction between endogenous and exogenous infections. Among exogenous infections, it has distinguished between individual and epidemic strains, thus differentiating cross-infection from independent acquisition.

Multiple Insertional Events, Restricted by the Genetic Background, Have Led to Acquisition of Pathogenicity Island II J96 -Like Domains among Escherichia coli Strains of Different Clinical Origins

“…The main phylogenetic groups (A, B1, B2, and D) were determined for all strains by using previously described PCR methods (11), and B2 strains were subgrouped by ribotyping with the restriction enzyme HindIII and with 16S and 23S rRNAs as the probes (1,(3)(4)(5).…”

Phenotypic and genotypic typing of food and clinical isolates of Enterobacter sakazakii

“…Biochemical evaluations of bacterial isolates are valuable for initial strain characterisation and are still in widespread use. However, the discriminatory power of biotyping is poor [23] and this technique has only limited ability to distinguish strains within a given species. Several phenotypic typing systems have been proposed for typing of Enterobacter spp.…”

Species Distribution and Ribotype Diversity of Burkholderia cepacia Complex Isolates from French Patients with Cystic Fibrosis

“…As there are diverse strains in the genomovars, we used ribotyping to compare these isolates and sought a possible genomovar-ribotype correlation. Ribotyping has previously proved valuable for discriminating among B. cepacia complex isolates (4,5,9). We also compared the French isolates with strains from other countries.…”