Molecular fingerprinting of Salmonella typhimurium by IS200-typing as a tool for epidemiological and evolutionary studies.

The aim of this work was to develop and evaluate a molecular typing strategy for Salmonella based on hybridization of chromosomal DNA with two different probes derived from insertion sequence IS200. Probe IS200-TT was specifically constructed for this study as a trimer of a 112 pb TaqI-TaqI fragment of IS200. Among several restriction enzymes evaluated, two were selected: EcoRI, which cuts the insertion sequence in two pieces, each one complementary to one of the probes used, and PstI, a restriction enzyme with no recognition site into IS200. With several combinations of these restrictions enzymes and probes, 43 Salmonella typhimurium strains were analyzed for copy number and location of IS200, as well as reproducibility and stability of the patterns. IS200 types have been shown to be stable, both in strains isolated from different patients implicated in the same salmonellosis outbreak and in strains isolated from the same patient at different times or from different specimens. The discriminatory power of the method has been 0.91 to 0.94. As a comparison, S. typhimurium strains were also ribotyped. Discriminatory power of the ribotypes oscillated between 0.44 and 0.55, depending on the enzyme used, and achieved a 0.78 value when the information obtained with two restriction enzymes was combined. Moreover, IS200 typing was able to differentiate among a group of S. typhimurium strains which were identical by ribotype and enzymatic electrophoretic mobility. These results enable us to conclude that, for the stability, reproducibility and discriminatory power of the patterns generated, IS200 probes can be a very useful tool in the molecular typing of S. typhimurium.