FOOD. Science. Technology. Quality

Food. SCIENCE. Technology. Quality

Food. Science. TECHNOLOGY. Quality

Food. Science. Technology. QUALITY

Authors

KINGA WIECZOREK, JACEK OSEK

Title

The usefulness of some selected PCR techniques in differentiating thermotolerant Campylobacter strains

Abstract

Campylobacter spp. is among the most common bacterial pathogens causing etiologic alimentary infections in humans. The major routes of transmitting this pathogen into human organisms are when people eat undercooked poultry, contaminated food, and/or drink contaminated water and non-pasteurised milk. Several discriminatory molecular methods are used in epidemiologic investigations as they make it possible to analyze a genotypic relationship among Campylobacter isolates obtained from the same or from different sources. One of such methods is an Enterobacterial Repetitive Intergenic Consensus – Polymerase Chain Reaction (ERIC-PCR). It consists in applying starters with long nucleotide sequences to amplification reactions. The said nucleotide sequences are complementary to conserved fragments present in the genome of Enterobacteriaceae bacteria, however, they are arranged in the genome of bacteria in different ways depending on the species or strain of the bacteria. ERIC-PCR makes it possible to quickly differentiate isolates, thus, it is a useful tool to analyze a prokaryotic genome. Recently, a length analysis of the restriction fragments (RFLP) of the flagellin gene flaA amplified by PCR technique has been applied to molecular typing of Campylobacter, especially of C. jejuni and C. coli,. Additionally, this method is used in epidemiologic investigations. The aim of the present paper was to investigate the capacity of ERIC-PCR and PCR-RFLP to distinguish Campylobacter strains isolated from poultry carcasses. The PCR-RFLP analysis performed resulted in five (5) different restriction profiles consisting of a series of DNA fragments showing different molecular masses. And the ERIC-PCR test made it possible to produce six (6) molecular profiles. The results of this investigation prove a relatively high discriminatory capacity of the two typing methods as applied in this paper, as well as their usability to genotypic differentiation of C. jejuni and C. coli strains.

Keywords

Campylobacter, differentiation, flaA typing, PCR-RFLP, ERIC-PCR

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