Biochemical fingerprinting and ribotyping of isolates of Actinobacillus equuli from healthy and diseased horses.

A total of 112 isolates of Actinobacillus equuli, including both clinical isolates and isolates from the oral cavity of healthy horses, were included in this study. All isolates were ribotyped and 92 of the isolates were also typed biochemically, with the commercially available Pheneplate (PhP) system, which includes 48 different substrates. As expected, ribotyping was more sensitive than biochemical fingerprinting in detecting differences between the isolates. The correlation between the two methods used was poor. It was not possible to distinguish clinical isolates from normal flora isolates by either of the two methods used.