Elements mediating VanA glycopeptide resistance in 106 diverse enterococci from humans and nonhuman sources were compared with the prototype VanA transposon, Tn1546, in Enterococcus faecium BM4147. The isolates included 64 from individual patients at 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom (isolated between 1987 and 1996) and 42 from nonhuman sources in the United Kingdom (27 from raw meat, 7 from a...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to characterize 34 vancomycin-resistant VanA Enterococcus faecium isolates obtained from two hospitals in Saudi Arabia and to assess Tn1546 variation within these isolates. METHODS PFGE and multilocus sequence typing (MLST) genotypes, antibiotic susceptibility patterns, the presence of enterococcal surface protein (esp) and hyaluronidase (hyl) genes and co...

Bacterial endospore formers can produce spores that are resistant to many food processing conditions, including heat. Some spores may survive heating processes aimed at production of commercially sterile foods. Recently, it was shown that a spoVA operon, designated spoVA2mob, present on a Tn1546 transposon in Bacillus subtilis, leads to profoundly increased wet heat resistance of B. subtilis sp...

Cases of bacteremia caused by vancomycin-resistant E. faecium (VRE-fm) increased significantly in Taiwan. The present multicenter surveillance study was performed to reveal the associated epidemiological characteristics. In 2012, 134 non-repetitive VRE-fm isolates were prospectively collected from 12 hospitals in Taiwan. Antimicrobial susceptibility, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), mul...

In several strains of Enterococcus faecium isolated in Europe, the cluster of genes encoding high-level resistance to vancomycin (VanA phenotype) resides on a 10.85-kb transposon, Tn1546, or closely related elements. To determine whether Tn1546 was conserved in recent enterococcal isolates from the northeastern United States, seven strains were compared by restriction mapping and DNA hybridizat...

Vancomycin-resistance in enterococci (VRE) is associated with isolates within ST18, ST17, ST78 Enterococcus faecium (Efm) and ST6 Enterococcus faecalis (Efs) human adapted lineages. Despite of its global spread, vancomycin resistance rates in enterococcal populations greatly vary temporally and geographically. Portugal is one of the European countries where Tn1546 (vanA) is consistently found i...

We report on the cloning and sequencing of the vanA gene cluster present in the glycopeptide-resistant clinical isolate Bacillus circulans VR0709 (R. Fontana, M. Ligozzi, C. Pedrotti, E. M. Padovani, and G. Cornaglia, Eur. J. Clin. Microbiol. Infect. Dis. 16:473-474, 1997). The presence of a vanA-related gene in VR0709 was demonstrated in a PCR assay which permitted the specific amplification o...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Infection with vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) has caused a therapeutic problem. VanA and VanB resistant types are the predominant phenotypes among vancomycin resistant enetrococci. Transposon 1546 (Tn1546) harboring the vanA gene cluster, plays an important role in the horizontal transfer of vanA gene. In this study, we examined the phenotypic and genotypic div...

The isolation of vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) in Brazil has rapidly increased, following the world wide tendency. We report in the present study the first isolation of vancomycin resistant Enterococcus faecalis (VRE) in the Northeast of Brazil. The four VRE isolates were characterized for antimicrobial susceptibility, genotypic typing by macro restriction of chromosomal DNA followed b...

Resistance to glycopeptide antibiotics in enterococci is mediated most frequently by the vanA gene cluster, which is found in both humans and animals (1, 8). This vanA gene cluster is carried on transposon Tn1546 or by closely related elements that contain vanR, vanS, vanH, vanA, vanX, and vanZ (1). Detailed molecular analyses of Tn1546-like elements in enterococcal isolates have revealed the p...