Comparison of five molecular subtyping methods for differentiation of Salmonella Kentucky isolates in Tunisia.

Salmonellosis is one of the most common causes of food-borne infection worldwide. In the last decade, Salmonella enterica serovar Kentucky has shown an increase in different parts of the world with the concurrent emergence of multidrug-resistant isolates. These drug-resistant types spread from Africa and the Middle East to Europe and Asia. Although S. Kentucky serovar is of potential human relevance, there is currently no standardized fingerprinting method for it, in Tunisia. In the present study, a collection of 57 Salmonella Kentucky isolates were analyzed using plasmid profiling, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), ribotyping, enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus (ERIC) fingerprinting, and Random Amplification of Polymorphic DNA. Plasmid profiling showed a discriminatory index (D) of 0.290, and only 9 out of 57 (16%) isolates carried plasmids, which represents a limitation of this technique. Fingerprinting of genomic DNA by PFGE and ribotyping produced 4 and 5 patterns, respectively. Distinct PFGE patterns (SX1, SX2, SX3, and SX4) were generated for only 28 strains out of 57 (49.1%) with a D value of 0.647. RAPD fingerprinting with primers RAPD1 and RAPD2 produced 4 and 20 patterns, respectively. ERIC fingerprinting revealed 14 different patterns with a high discriminatory index (D) of 0.903. When the methods were combined, the best combination of two methods was ERIC-2 with RAPD2. These results indicates that a single method cannot be relied upon for discriminating between S. Kentucky strains, and a combination of typing methods such ERIC2 and RAPD2 allows further discrimination.