Ribotyping of coagulase-negative staphylococci with special emphasis on intraspecific typing of Staphylococcus epidermidis.

Coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS), particularly Staphylococcus epidermidis, are increasingly being recognized as opportunistic pathogens. They are often multiply antibiotic resistant and can cause nosocomial outbreaks. For clinical and epidemiological reasons, accurate species identification and typing are imperative. Ribotyping, i.e., the generation of characteristic fragment patterns by hybridization of restriction endonuclease fragments of total DNA with labeled standard rRNA from Escherichia coli, has been applied to CoNS for species identification by various investigators. The present study, involving 115 randomly collected clinical isolates of CoNS, provides ambiguous evidence with respect to those findings. Eighty six S. epidermidis strains were ribotyped intraspecifically. Eleven different ribotypes were found after digestion with EcoRI, and 10 were found with HindIII. A combination of the two restriction endonucleases resulted in an increase in the discriminatory power (DP) from 14.3 to 31.6%. A combination of ribotyping with biotyping raised the DP to a maximum of 48.6%. The reproducibility of ribotyping was 100% after greater than 400 generations of growth. No correlation between methicillin resistance and certain ribotypes among the S. epidermidis strains was observed. Ribotyping is considered a useful tool for the intraspecific typing of CoNS for epidemiological purposes. The DP can be increased by the use of additional restriction endonucleases.