A 13-Plex PCR for high-resolution melting-based screening of clinically important Staphylococcus species in animals

A single-tube multiplex real-time PCR targeting the nuclease (nuc) gene and subsequent high-resolution melting analysis (HRMA) were used to identify 13 different Staphylococcus species. The nuc gene was targeted due to its low intraspecies variation and the greater interspecies variation than the 16S rRNA gene in Staphylococcus. We used HRMA software that can store and compare HRMA profiles from different runs as long as the runs contain the same reference reaction. Thus, we reduced the 14 PCRs to 2 different PCRs, one targeting the unknown sequence and the other targeting the reference sequences to screen 13 different Staphylococcus species. The specificity of the developed method was tested on 16 different Staphylococcus reference strains and 115 different field strains that were isolated from the milk of cattle with subclinical mastitis. We conclude that the method can be used to quickly and cost-effectively differentiate Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) from other Staphylococcus species (S. epidermidis, S. lugdunensis, S. schleiferi, S. hyicus, S. chromogenes, S. lentus, S. haemolyticus, S. xylosus, S. saprophyticus, S. warneri, S. simulans and S. hominis).