Efficacy of two DNA fingerprinting methods for typing Acinetobacter baumannii isolates

Performance of macrorestriction and repetitive extragenic palindromic DNA sequence-based PCR (REP-PCR) to type Acinetobacter baumannii isolates was quantitatively estimated using a test population of 54 outbreak-related, 29 endemic infection-related and 17 epidemiologically-unrelated isolates. Reproducibility and stability for macrorestriction were 100%, and REP-PCR showed only slightly lower stability. Macrorestriction resolved 18 fingerprints and REP-PCR 10 DNA patterns, forming eight and seven clusters at 75% of similarity level, respectively. Intercluster band variation was > 7 bands for both methods. Although, all endemic isolates, except one, were concordantly grouped by both methods, macrorestriction distinguished a greater number of subtypes over one year study. For outbreaks, the epidemiologic concordance for both methods was 88%. The discriminatory index for macrorestriction and REP-PCR was 0.884 and 0.877, respectively. In conclusion, both methods showed similar efficacy as epidemiological markers, and by concordance, this study demonstrated that for REP-PCR typing, a > or = 7 bands difference seemed an appropriate threshold to identify unrelated strains.