[Multilocus sequencing--a new method of genotyping bacteria and first results of its use]

Comparative characterization (molecular typing) of isolates within a bacterial species is one of the major problems in microbiology and epidemiology. However, it is rather difficult to correlate data obtained in various laboratories, because traditional, including molecular, methods employed in typing pathogenic microorganisms cannot be standardized. In 1998, Maiden et al. proposed multilocus sequence typing (MLST); through which alleles of several housekeeping genes are directly assessed by nucleotide sequencing, each unique allele combination determining a sequence type of a strain. The advantages of this approach are that the culturing of pathogenic microorganisms is avoided, as their gene fragments are amplified directly from biological samples, and that the sequencing data are unambiguous, easy to standardize, and electronically portable. The latter makes it possible to generate an expandable global database for each species at an Internet site, in order to use it for the purposes of genotyping pathogenic bacteria (and other infectious agents). MLST protocols have been elaborated for Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Helicobacter pylori; those for Streptococcus pyogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, and Haemophilus influenzae are now being developed. Basic principles and the first results of MLST have been reviewed, including data on the distribution and microevolution of N. meningitidis clones causing epidemic meningococcal infection, the relative recombination and mutation rates in the N. meningitidis genome, the identification of antibiotic-resistant S. pneumoniae clones causing severe generalized infection, the grouping of H. pylori isolates from various geographic regions, etc.