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Journal of Clinical Microbiology, January 2007, p. 127-133, Vol. 45, No. 1
0095-1137/07/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JCM.01866-06
Copyright © 2007, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Validation of Pulsed-Field Gel Electrophoresis and spa Typing for Long-Term, Nationwide Epidemiological Surveillance Studies of Staphylococcus aureus Infections{triangledown}

M. Hallin,* A. Deplano, O. Denis, R. De Mendonça, R. De Ryck, and M. J. Struelens

Laboratoire de Référence MRSA-Staphylocoques, Department of Microbiology, Hôpital Erasme, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Received 8 September 2006/ Accepted 31 October 2006

Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) of genomic macrorestriction fragments has been used by the Belgian Reference Laboratory for Staphylococci for national hospital surveys of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus since 1992. The sequencing of the polymorphic X region of the protein A gene (spa typing) offers significant advantages over PFGE in terms of speed, ease of interpretation, and exportability. To validate its potential use for national surveillance, we evaluated the robustness of spa typing compared with that of PFGE based on a collection of 217 S. aureus strains representative of the Belgian S. aureus epidemiology during the last 13 years. spa typing and PFGE both showed high discriminatory power (discriminatory indexes of 0.98 and 0.96, respectively) and achieved high concordance (95.9%) in type classification. Both methods also showed good concordance with multilocus sequence typing (MLST) (95.5%). However, we observed occasional "violations" of MLST clonal complex assignment by spa typing. Our results suggest that both PFGE and spa typing are reliable methods for long-term, nationwide epidemiological surveillance studies. We suggest that spa typing, which is a single-locus-based method, should preferably be used in combination with additional markers, such as staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec typing or resistance or virulence gene detection.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Service de Microbiologie, Hôpital Erasme, 808, route de Lennik, 1070 Brussels, Belgium. Phone: 32 2 555 34 84. Fax: 32 2 555 31 10. E-mail: mahallin{at}ulb.ac.be.

{triangledown} Published ahead of print on 8 November 2006.

Journal of Clinical Microbiology, January 2007, p. 127-133, Vol. 45, No. 1
0095-1137/07/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JCM.01866-06
Copyright © 2007, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.



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