Evaluation of phenotypic and genotypic markers for clinical strains of Acinetobacter baumannii (original) (raw)

Acinetobacter baumannii is an important opportunistic pathogen that is rapidly evolving toward multidrug resistance and is involved in various nosocomial infections that are often severe. It strongly prompts the epidemiological study of A. baumannii infections. However, there is no a generally accepted typing scheme. Different genotypic and phenotypic procedures were evaluated for the characterization of clinical isolates of A. baumannii isolated from a community hospital of Rosario, Argentina (Hospital de Emergencias Clemente Alvarez, HECA), during a period of four years. These included PCR with degenerate oligonucleotide primers (DO-PCR), repetitive extragenic palindromic-PCR (REP-PCR), pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), and antibiotyping. Amongst individual methods, DO-PCR and PFGE were found the most suitable methods to discriminate A. baumannii clinical isolates [discriminatory indexes (D) of 0.98 and 0.96, respectively]. On the other hand, both antibiotyping and REP-PCR ...