DNA relatedness and serotyping of Leptospira strains

In a previous study (5), the constructed phylogenetic tree for leptospires belonging to 12 different serovars common in Central Europe made the prediction of serovar from knowing the genotype and vice versa possible.

The study was aimed at investigation of the usefulness of such procedure to distinguish in between at present to us available and worldwide accepted reference strains of pathogenic Leptospira serovars.

One hundred and seventy seven Leptospira strains representing different serovars were tested. DNA fingerprints of these strains were performed, digitally captured and as described earlier of those phylogenetic tree using different fingerprinting software was constructed using UPGMA clustering method with band matching by the Dice coefficient (5).

At this tree, 145 of 177 Leptospira strains tested each took a unique position, and the remaining 32 strains were distributed at 15 different positions (each of 14 positions taken by two different strains and one position taken by four strains).

The constructed phylogenetic tree likely to be very useful in prediction of Leptospira serovar in most cases of an infection so the saving time and being helpful in serovar identification of the pathogenic agent (Fig. 1, Ref. 9).