Clinical evaluation of the DiversiLab microbial typing system using repetitive-sequence-based PCR for characterization of Staphylococcus aureus strains.

The DiversiLab System, which includes microfluidics-based detection, reagent kits, and software for data processing and analysis, is an automated method using repetitive sequence-based PCR (rep-PCR) for microbial strain typing. To assess the reliability of the DiversiLab System for strain characterization of Staphylococcus aureus, we tested clinical isolates sent to ARUP Laboratories for typing and compared results to those of pulsed field electrophoresis (PFGE) aided by the cluster analysis provided by BioNumerics software. spa typing was performed when the results of these two methods for an outbreak were not concordant. The study included 89 S. aureus isolates (65 mecA positive, 24 mecA negative) from 19 outbreaks (2 to 11 isolates/outbreak). The DiversiLab and PFGE-BioNumerics results were concordant for 15 of the 19 outbreaks. For the remaining four outbreaks, there was partial concordance between the two methods. spa typing results were the same as or more similar to rep-PCR results for three of those outbreaks and were more similar to PFGE results for one. With regard to performance, the DiversiLab system was considerably less labor intensive than PFGE and provided results in less than 24 h, compared with 2 to 3 days for PFGE. Additionally, the Web-based DiversiLab software provides standardized comparisons among isolates almost instantaneously and generates user-friendly, customized reports.