Development and evaluation of a rapid strategy to determine enterotoxin gene content in Staphylococcus aureus

Enterotoxins of S. aureus are important molecules displaying superantigenic properties. To date no less than 18 enterotoxins have been identified in S. aureus and their role has been documented in very diverse diseases. Using available nucleotide sequence information, we developed a rapid and automated PCR-based approach to evaluate enterotoxin content in S aureus. We studied a collection of S. aureus strains previously analyzed for enterotoxins gene content and report a perfect correlation between simplex and multiplex PCR assays for the presence of all enterotoxin genes described so far. The determination of enterotoxin content relies on 4 multiplex PCR tubes whose amplification products are resolved by a rapid microcapillary electrophoresis. Automated analysis of the PCR profiles evaluates for the presence of the 18 enterotoxin genes in less than 3 h and at moderate cost. Finally, the use of enterotoxin gene content for genotyping purpose was compared to multi-locus variable number of tandem repeat assay and spa genotyping. Analysis revealed an important homogeneity of the genetic backgrounds for strains harboring the egc cluster as well as a large diversity for strains harboring other enterotoxins but lacking the egc cluster. A combined genotyping method that includes rapid enterotoxin content determination appears informative for various epidemiological survey purposes.