COMPARATIVE CLASSIFICATION OF ACINETOBACTER-BAUMANNII STRAINS USING 7DIFFERENT TYPING METHODS

A group of 49 Acinetobacter baumannii strains obtained from several ho spital outbreaks and some sporadic cases were typed by biotyping, anti microbial susceptibility testing, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PF GE), plasmid typing, multilocus enzyme electrophoresis, whole-cell pro tein profile, and Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. All these methods have shown a high degree of reproducibility and are cap able of recognising strains from the same epidemiological event. Howev er, their power to discriminate between epidemiologically unrelated st rains varies, with PFGE being superior to the other methods investigat ed. FT-IR spectroscopy, which has not yet been used for typing of Acin etobacter strains, proved to be a very rapid and highly reproducible m ethod, but was somewhat limited in its discriminating power.