Enterotoxin Production and DNA Fingerprinting of Staphylococcus aureus Isolated from Diverse Samples by Pulsed-Field Gel Electrophoresis

Staphylococcus aureus is an important animal and human pathogen implicated in a variety of disease including food-poisoning caused by staphyloccal enterotoxins (SEs). In order to investigate the difference in genomic types and to monitor the transmission of S. aureus isolates, a total of 25 S. aureus isolates from different sources were determined for their genotypic characteristics by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) in addition to their ability to enterotoxin production and antibiotic resistance patterns in this study. All the isolates were susceptible to amikacin, and the resistance pattern to ampicillin and penicillin were most common among 14 different patterns. Eleven of 24 isolates produced one of three SEs, SEA, SEC or SED. Sixteen representative PFGE patterns were obtained by Smal restriction fragments of S. aureus isolates. Analysis of dendrogram based on PFGE band patterns suggested that food-poisoning outbreaks be caused by the diverse sources of food, of which their raw materials were infected with S. aureus. Also, it could be concluded that PFGE was a powerful tool for epidemiological tracing of infection source for food-initiated outbreaks.