Molecular characterization of a. baumannii strains isolated from nosocomial infections by AFLP and pfge methods

Importance of A. baumannii is rasing among nosocomial infections. It is isolated so often especially from intensive care units. Surveillance programmes, rational antibiotic usage, education of personnel and hygiene is very important to prevent nosocomial infections. Like in most of nosocomial infections, it is very important to evaluate the epidemiological properties and to elucidate the clonnal relations between A. baumannii isolates. Among theese methods the PFGE is accepted as golden standart in terms of surveillance of outbreaks with especially A.bauannii associated infections and in determining the source and clonnal relations of those strains. But in recent years it is suggested that AFLP could be an alternative to PFGE in terms of advantages of cost, feedback time and discriminitary power. In this study, the investigation of availability of AFLP method was the goal and A. baumannii was selected as test organism while PFGE was the control method. 49 A. baumannii isolates which are identified as carbapenem resistant and sent to Cukurova university faculty of medicine Balcali Hospital Central laboratory from various wards were included as testing isolates. The clonnal relations between isolates were determined both with PFGE and AFLP methods to investigate the discrimination power of methods. The 11 of 18 strains which are distributed into subclusters in group A with 100% compatibility were found to be in 100% related subclusters in AFLP too and furthermore 14 strains which were in this cluster were found to distribute in independent single-membered clusters by two of the methods. Thus when considering the ability of two methods to distribute same strains into 100% identical and unrelated single membered clusters the specifity of AFLP was found to be 78.1%(25/32). However there was no significant difference between discriminitary power of two methods. Keywords: Acinetobacter baumannii, AFLP, Pulsed Field Gel Electrophoresis