Over a 3-month period, six immunocompromised patients developed one or more episodes of Burkholderia pickettii bacteremia and/or catheter infection. Vials of a commercially available, "sterile" saline for injection which had been used for flushing the patients' indwelling intravenous devices were implicated as the common source of the organisms. No further cases were diagnosed once the use of t...

Forty-five Haemophilus influenzae strains isolated from patients were characterized based on biochemical characteristics. Their capsular types were determined by polymerase chain reaction (PCR); they were compared, using two molecular methods [ribotyping with a specific DNA probe amplified from the 16S rDNA region from H. influenzae and through restriction fragment length polymorphism (RLFP) of...

Ribotyping has been widely used to characterise the seventh pandemic clone including South American and O139 variants which appeared in 1991 and 1992 respectively. To reveal the molecular basis of ribotype variation we analysed the rrn operons and their flanking regions. All but one variation detected by BglI, the most discriminatory enzyme, was found to be due to changes within the rrn operons...

Fifty-one strains representing Xanthomonas campestris pv. manihotis and cassavae and different pathovars occurring on plants of the family Euphorbiaceae were characterized by ribotyping with a 16S+23S rRNA probe of Escherichia coli and by restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis with a plasmid probe from X. campestris pv. manihotis. Pathogenicity tests were performed on cassava (Maniho...

The aim of this study was to develop a typing scheme for Pseudomonas pseudomallei by comparison of patterns of restriction fragment length polymorphisms in rRNA genes (ribotyping). BamHI restriction digests of 100 isolates from various animal (34), human (58), and environmental (6) sources, including six reference strains, were hybridized to Escherichia coli 16S and 23S rRNAs. A chemiluminescen...

Confirmed isolates of nontoxigenic Corynebacterium diphtheriae in England and Wales increased substantially from 1986 to 1994. Ribotyping of 121 isolates confirmed in 1995 showed that 90 were of a single strain isolated exclusively from the throat; none had previously been identified in toxigenic strains from U.K. or non-U.K. residents. The upward trend in nontoxigenic C. diphtheriae probably r...

Vancomycin resistant enterococci are increasingly being isolated from inpatients. This report describes the colonial variation present in most isolates of vancomycin resistant Enterococcus faecium obtained at this hospital. Colonial variants within the same culture were indistinguishable by antimicrobial susceptibility, biochemical reactions, and ribotyping. Failure to appreciate this colonial ...

We characterized 670 Clostridium difficile isolates collected from patients in 84 hospitals in Germany in 2008. PCR ribotyping showed high prevalence of ribotype 001 and restricted dissemination of ribotype 027 strains. Fluoroquinolone resistance and associated gyrase mutations were frequent in various ribotypes, but no resistance to metronidazole or vancomycin was noted.

Clinical isolates of Mycobacterium malmoense collected over 5 years from patients across Scotland with a variety of diseases have been characterized by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), ribotyping, and 16S ribosomal DNA gene sequencing. Results indicate that this species harbors little genetic diversity and that the different strain types that were identified by PFGE showed no correlatio...

We established a typing system for Prevotella intermedia and Prevotella nigrescens using the combination of PCR ribotyping and arbitrarily primed PCR (AP-PCR) fingerprinting and applied this system to the study of intrafamilial incidence of these species in the oral cavity. PCR ribotyping followed by subtyping by AP-PCR fingerprinting was applied to each type strain of P. intermedia and P. nigr...