Prevalence of Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans serotypes in Japanese patients with periodontitis.

Oral Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans strains are serologically classified into 5 distinct groups, a to e. We examined the distribution of A. actinomycetemcomitans serotypes in Japanese patients with periodontitis. A total of 157 A. actinomycetemcomitans clinical isolates from diseased sites of 39 patients with periodontitis were serotyped by using serotype-specific rabbit antisera against A. actinomycetemcomitans serotypes a, b, c, d and e strains. In the immunodiffusion assay, autoclaved extracts of 42, 6, 39, 9 and 41 A. actinomycetemcomitans clinical isolates reacted with serotypes a, b, c, d and e antisera, respectively. Although 37 patients were infected with a serotype strain, 2 patients harbored 2 different serotype strains, b/e and b/untypeable. To establish a correlation between serotype and genotype of A. actinomycetemcomitans clinical isolates from 2 patients who had different serotype strains, we used arbitrarily primed polymerase chain reaction (AP-PCR) to fingerprint clinical isolates of different serotypes. The AP-PCR genotypes among 4 clinical isolates (b/e and b/untypeable) were identical to that of A. actinomycetemcomitans Y4 (serotype b), indicating the presence of multiple A. actinomycetemcomitans serotypes which are genetically homogeneous in the periodontally diseased sites of patients with periodontitis.