IMR Press / FBL / Volume 7 / Issue 5 / DOI: 10.2741/speert

Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.

Article

Molecular epidemiology of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

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1 Research Centre, Vancouver, B.C., V5Z 4H4, Canada
Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2002, 7(5), 354–361; https://doi.org/10.2741/speert
Published: 1 October 2002
Abstract

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a serious opportunistic pathogen in certain compromised hosts, such as those with cystic fibrosis, thermal burns and cancer. It also causes less severe noninvasive disease, such as otitis externa and hot tub folliculitis, in normal hosts. P. aeruginosa is phenotypically very unstable, particularly in patients with chronic infection. Phenotypic typing techniques are useful for understanding the epidemiology of acute infections, but they are limited by their discriminatory power and by their inability to group isolates that are phenotypically unrelated but genetically homologous. Molecular typing techniques, developed over the past decade, are highly discriminatory and are useful for typing strains from patients with chronic infection where the bacterial phenotype is unstable; this is particularly true in cystic fibrosis, where patients often are infected with the same strain for several decades, but the bacteria undergo phenotypic alteration. Molecular typing techniques, which have proven useful in typing P. aeruginosa for epidemiological purposes, include pulsed field gel electrophoresis, restriction fragment length polymorphic DNA analysis, random amplified polymorphic DNA analysis, repetitive extrapalindromic PCR analysis, and multilocus sequence typing. These methods are generally only available in specialized laboratories, but they should be used when data from phenotypic typing analysis are ambiguous or when phenotypic methods are unreliable, such as in cystic fibrosis.

Keywords
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Epidemiology
Cystic fibrosis
Neutropenia
Burns
Molecular epidemiology
Pulsed field gel electrophoresis
Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA
Review
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