Discriminatory usefulness of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and sequence-based typing in Legionella outbreaks
Sara Quero1,2, Marian García-Núñez1,2,3, Noemí Párraga-Niño1,2,3
1Unitat de Malalties Infeccioses, Fundació Institut d'Investigació Germans Trias I Pujol, Badalona, Spain E-08916.
Aim:
To compare the discriminatory power of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and sequence-based typing (SBT) in Legionella outbreaks for determining the infection source.
Materials & Methods:
Twenty-five investigations of Legionnaires' disease were analyzed by PFGE, SBT and Dresden monoclonal antibody.
Results:
The results suggested that monoclonal antibody could reduce the number of Legionella isolates to be characterized by molecular methods. The epidemiological concordance PFGE-SBT was 100%, while the molecular concordance was 64%. Adjusted Wallace index (AW) showed that PFGE has better discriminatory power than SBT (AWSBT→PFGE = 0.767; AWPFGE→SBT = 1). The discrepancies appeared mostly in sequence type (ST) 1, a worldwide distributed ST for which PFGE discriminated different profiles.
Conclusion:
SBT discriminatory power was not sufficient verifying the infection source, especially in worldwide distributed STs, which were classified into different PFGE patterns.
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