COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT PCR APPROACHES FOR CHARACTERIZATION OF BURKHOLDERIA (PSEUDOMONAS) CEPACIA ISOLATES

In this study, we evaluated three PCR methods for epidemiological typi ng of Burkholderia ia (Pseudomonas) cepacia-PCR-ribotyping, arbitraril y primed PCR (AP-PCR) and enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consen sus sequence PCR (ERIC-PCR)-and compared them with pulsed-field gel el ectrophoresis, The analysis was performed with 31 isolates of B. cepac ia, comprising 23 epidemiologically unrelated isolates and 8 isolates collected from the same patient during two episodes of bacteremia, Pul sed-field gel electrophoresis, ERIC-PCR, and AP-PCR identified 23 dist inct types among the 23 unrelated isolates, while PCR-ribotyping only identified 12 strain types, even after AluI digestion of the amplifica tion products, Among the eight isolates collected from the same patien t, all typing techniques revealed two clones of strains, The day-to-da y reproducibilities of PCR-ribotyping and ERIC-PCR were good, while gr eater day-to-day variations were noted in the fingerprints obtained by AP-PCR. We conclude that all three PCR techniques are useful for rapi d epidemiological typing of B. cepacia, but ERIC-PCR seems to be more reproducible and discriminative.