• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.15-21
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• 2004

In an attempt to analyze the characteristics of domestic pathogenic strains of S. pneumoniae, the basic epidemiological charactristics of pathogenic strains such as their serotypes and frequency of penicillin resistance, and pattern of chromosomal DNA from PFGE(pulsed-field gel electrophoresis) were observed. For this study,56 strains of S. pneumoniae isolated from inpatients and outpatients in the four domestic university hospitals were collected from January to December in 1998. Among those strains, a total of 56 pathogenic strains from blood(39 isolates), cerebrospinal fluid(8 isolates) and other specimen(9 isolates) were selected and isolated. The penicillin resistance frequency of those 56 strains was identified with disk diffusion method with 66.1％. From the invasive strains, predominant serotypes were isolated in the order of 19F(12.5％), 23F(10.7%), 14(10.7%) and 9V(10.7％), totalling 45 percent. This experiment also used PFGE patterns to compare the correlations among genetic subtypes in several serotypes. The DNA fragments digested with Sma I and Apa I were resolved by PFGE. The PFGE patterns digested with Sma I were better than Apa I for analysis. In the DNA fragments digested with Sma 1, PFGE analysis of 56 S. pneumoniae isolates showed 25 different patterns. As a result, serotype was on the whole correlated to PFGE pattern on the ground that each different PFGE pattern by serotype was observed. This study can be utilized not only fur the study of incidence trend of domestic pneumococcal diseases but also as a useful basic data for the development of identification tool and treatment.

• Journal of Yeungnam Medical Science
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.366-385
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• 1995

Epidemiological studies are important in both the prevention and treatment of mycobacterial infections. This study was initiated to establish the pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) method, which are not yet extensively studied. The most apprpriate restriction endonucleases included DraI, AsnI, and XbaI. The optimal PFGE condition was different according to the enzymes used. Two stage PFGE was performed, in case of DraI first stage was performed with 10 seconds of initial pulse and 15 seconds of final pulse, while the second stage was performed with 60 seconds of initial pulse and 70 seconds of final pulse. The electrophoresis time for DraI-PFGE was 14 hours for each stage. Electrophoresis was performed for 22 hours, in case of XbaI, with 3 seconds of initial pulse and 12 seconds of final pulse. Electrophoresis was performed for 22 hours, in case of AsnI, with 5 seconds of initial pulse and 25 seconds of final pulse. In all cases the voltage of the electrophoresis was maintained constantly at 200 voltage. Standard mycobacterial strains, which included Mycobacterium bovis BCG, M. tuberculosis, and M. fortuitum, could not be differentiated by PFGE analysis. PFGE analysis was performed to differentiate 9 clinically isolated M. fortuitum strains using AsnI. All M. fortuitum strains showed different genotypes except 2 strains. Cluster analysis divided M. fortuitum strains into 2 large groups. PFGE analysis was performed to further differentiate M. fortuitum isolates using XbaI. The undifferentiated 2 M. fortuitum strains showed different PFGE patterns with Xba I. Cluster analysis of the XbaI-PFGE patterns showed more complex grouping than AsnI-PFGE patterns, which showed that XbaI-PFGE analysis was better than AsnI-PFGE in M. fortuitum genotyping. The top dissimilarity values of AsnI-PFGE and XbaI-PFGE were 0.74 and 0.75, respectively. This value was higher than that of arbitrarily primed polymerase chain reaction (AP-PCR) analysis and lower than that of restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis. This suggested that PFGE can be used as a supportive or alternative genotyping method to RFLP analysis.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Service
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.257-264
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• 2009

Subtyping of Brucella abortus isolates is epidemiologically important for monitoring of bovine brucellosis outbreaks. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) is considered as a gold standard of molecular typing methods to study the DNA polymorphisms of bacteria. In this study, we analyzed using PFGE the DNA fragment profiles of B. abortus isolated in Gyeongbuk province from 1998 to 2006. The genomic DNA was digested with the restriction endonuclease Xba I, Xho I and Smi I followed gel electrophoresis. No distinguishable patterns of the genomic DNA digested with Xba I and Xho I were observed among the field isolates of B. abortus tested in this study. But Smi I restriction enzyme resulted in two PFGE patterns consisting of 13-15 bands that ranged in size from 33 to 668bp by standard marker. The cluster analysis by DNA fingerprinting software showed 93.75% similarity between two PFGE patterns. No different PFGE patterns were recognized among the isolates originated from various years, regions and cow breeds.

• Journal of Microbiology
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.80-86
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• 2004

Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) typing was applied to the epidemiological investigation of 21 Candida tropicalis isolates collected from urine specimens of 11 patients and one healthcare worker, in an intensive care unit (ICU) over a 4-month period. Seventeen epidemiologically unrelated strains from 14 patients were also tested to determine the discriminatory power of PFGE. PFGE typing consisted of electrophoretic karyotyping (EK) and restriction endonuclease analysis of genomic DNA (REAG), using two restriction enzymes (BssHII and SfiI). The EK pattern was the same in all 38 isolates, while REAG using SfiI separated the isolates into nine types. However, 16 different PFGE types were iden-tified by REAG with BssHII, and the same results were obtained when the results of both REAG tests were combined. In serial urinary isolates from 10 patients, all strains from each patient had the same PFGE pattern. While the epidemiologically unrelated strains from 14 patients consisted of 13 different PFGE types, the 20 isolates from the 11 ICU patients fell into only two PFGE types (types Cl and C2), and these apparently originated from the two different outbreaks. All strains of type Cl (n = 12) were isolated from six patients, between November 1999 and January 2000, and all of the type C2 strains (n=8) were isolated from five patients, during January and February 2000. This study shows two con-secutive clusters of C. tropicalis candiduria in an ICU, defined by PFGE typing, and also demonstrates that a PFGE typing method using BssHII is perhaps the most useful method for investigating C. tropi-calis candiduria.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Service
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.283-288
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• 2012

Streptococcus(S.) suis is a pathogen, causing meningitis, septicemia and sudden death in weaning piglets as well as fattening pigs. Using multiplex PCR method based S. suis capsular genes, 61 S. suis isolates was classified as serotypes 2, 7, 9 and untypable. Genotyping of S. suis isolates was analysed by PFGE pattern with treated Sma I restricted enzyme. Of the 61 S. suis, 25 (40.9%) were serotype 2, 6 (9.8%) were serotype 7, 5 (8.2%) were serotype 9, and 25 (40.9%) were untypable, respectively. Twenty four PFGE patterns were detected in this study and also PFGE patterns were classified according to serotype; serotype 2 was classified as 6 genotypes, serotype 7 was 5 genotypes, serotype 9 was 3 genotypes, and untypable was 11 genotypes, respectively.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.77-86
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• 2003

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.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.295-299
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• 2005

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.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.9-13
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• 2005

A total of 22 Salmonella enterica serotype Enteritidis (S. Enteritidis) isolates from human and chicken sources were analyzed by pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) using XbaI restriction enzyme to assess the genetic relationships between strains from different sources. PFGE permitted the resolution of XbaI restriction fragments of the 22 S. Enteritidis into 6 distinct PFGE types (PFT), designated PFT1 to PFT6, and 2 subtypes within PFT2, and allowed to detect between 9 and 10 bands with fragments sizes in the range of $25\~635\;kb$. Four of twelve isolates from human showed an identical PFGE patterns with 2 isolates from chickens. Also, another one isolate from human showed an identical PFGE patterns with other 5 isolates from chickens. Only one isolate from chicken, however, showed a different pattern compared to other PFTs. These results suggested that sporadic human food-poisoning cases infections caused by S. Enteritidis in this study were due to the consumption of contaminated chicken meats and that a clonally highly similar strains exist and spread between human and chicken sources.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.121-128
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• 2005

A total of 30L monocytogenes strains from different sources including 13 strains isolated from the foreign imported meat were genotyped in order to establish their genetic relatedness and to compare them with the foreign isolates. PFGE analysis of genomic DNA showed the $11\~16$ fragments ranging in size from 38 to 504 kb. Eleven different PFGE types $(1\~11)$ were identified in the dendrogram at $75\%$ similarity, and the two major PFGE types, type 1 and 2, contained $94\%$ of domestic isolates (16/17). All isolates from domestic beef and pork carcass were grouped in each different type, however, isolates from chicken were clustered together with those from pork and beef. We also found all foreign strains were unrelated with each other, regardless of geographic criteria and that they could be differentiated from those from the domestic isolates by PFGE pattern. The PFGE pattern of one isolate from chicken wing, which the chicken meat was found to be imported from foreign country, was closely related to that of isolate from the Thailand.

• Journal of Microbiology
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.106-112
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• 2006

In this study, the genetic diversities of multi-resistant Salmonella typhimurium (ST) isolates were analyzed via the application of both pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis methods, using 6 kinds of primers (REP, ERIC, SERE, BOX, P-1254 and OPB-17). And their discriminative abilities (DA) were also compared in order to determine the most effective and reliable analysis method. 118 S. typhimurium isolates, cultured from diverse animals and human patients in Korea beginning in 1993, were analyzed and subjected to a comparison of Simpson's index of diversity (SID), using both PFGE and PCR methods. PFGE by XbaI enzyme digestion allowed for discrimination into 9 pulsotypes, with high SID values (0.991) on the genomic DNA level. This shows that PFGE is a very discriminative genotypic tool, and also that multiple clones of S. typhimurium isolates had existed in domestic animals and humans in Korea since 1993. However, we could ultimately not to trace the definitive sources or animal reservoirs of specific S. typhimurium isolates examined in this study. Depending on the SID values, the combined method (7 kinds of method) was found to be the most discriminative method, followed by (in order) SERE-PCR, REP-PCR, ERIC-PCR, PFGE & OPB-17 (RAPD), P-1254 (RAPD), and BOX-PCR at the $80\%$ clone cut-off value. This finding suggests that the REP-PCR method (which utilizes 4 primer types) may be an alternative tool to PFGE for the genotyping of S. typhimurium isolates, with comparable cost, time, and labor requirement. The establishment of a highly reliable and discriminatory method for epidemiologic analysis is considered necessary in order for researchers to trace the sources of specific pathogens and, consequently, to control and prevent the spread of epidemic S. typhimurium isolates to humans.