Genetic variation in Staphylococcus aureus coagulase genes: potential and limits for use as epidemiological marker.

To perform coagulase gene typing, the repeated units encoding hypervariable regions of the Staphylococcus aureus coagulase gene were amplified by the PCR technique; this was followed by AluI restriction enzyme digestion and analysis of restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) patterns. In order to assess the discriminatory power of this typing method, 30 epidemiologically unrelated S. aureus strains which differed by their pulsed-field gel electrophoresis patterns were examined. Although 18 of the 30 strains had unique and unshared AluI RFLP patterns, there were only four observed patterns in the remaining 12 strains. This finding indicated that unrelated strains may share identical AluI RFLP patterns. To elucidate the degree of genetic variation in the C-terminus-encoding loci within the coagulase genes, the PCR products of these 12 strains were subjected to Taq polymerase-mediated sequencing. Sequence analysis confirmed the AluI recognition sites in each of the four RFLP groups and demonstrated that AluI appears to yield the highest RFLP in restriction enzyme analysis. By their DNA sequences the majority of strains sharing common AluI groups could be clearly differentiated from each other and revealed between 93.2 and 98.5% homology. When we determined the nucleotide sequences of two strains after six subcultivations no significant alterations were observed. Because the discriminatory power of the current coagulase gene typing method is not great enough to be used as the sole method to type S. aureus, additional techniques are necessary. Sequence analysis of the repeated unit-encoding region for the typing of S. aureus may be potentially useful as an alternative to other current molecular typing techniques.