초록
Pullorum disease due to Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica bioserovar Pullorum (S. pullorum) is reported to be an endemic disease in domestic poultry flocks. The pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) subtyping method was used to assess the extent of genetic diversity and clonality of most of salmonella serotypes and other diverse bacterial species from animals and environmental samples in worldwide. Nowadays, PFGE has already been evaluated as a gold standards for molecular subtyping of salmonella serotypes compared with other molecular analysis methods. PFGE of XbaI digested chromosomal DNA from 23 strains of S. pullorum gave 5 distinctive pulsotypes (from SXPI to SXPV) with 5% confidence range of Dice coefficients, indicating that PFGE is very discriminative and that multiple clones of S. pullorum have been existed and diffused all of domestic poultry flocks industries since 1995. Two dominant pulsogroups (SXA & SXB) appeared as a major clones in this country, because they had consistently been recovered from diverse sources including both chicken organs and raw feed materials between 1995 and 1998. In addition, the matching percentage of PFGE profiles (PFP) among strains from both chickens and feed ingredients provides indirect evidence of the possible transmission of pullorum disease from contaminated raw feed ingredients for chicken production. In calculating of discrimination index (DI) for PFGE method by Simpson's index, DI was appeared as 0.917. Therefore, this index suggested that the present PFGE would seem to be a desirable and confident molecular typing method for S. pullorum strains. To our knowledge for pullorum disease, this is the first study to compare S. pullorum strains from chicken organs and feed samples using the PFGE.