Characterization of Escherichia hermannii by ribosomal DNA restriction fragment length polymorphism.

Ribosomal DNA polymorphism was used to characterize strains of Escherichia hermannii and to differentiate them from E. coli. DNA from 11 E. hermannii strains previously separated into three zymotypes by enzyme electrophoretic polymorphism was digested with HindIII and EcoRI restriction enzymes and analyzed by Southern blotting. The 10 ribotypes obtained with EcoRI fell into 3 groups which correlated with the corresponding zymotypes, and the 5 ribotypes obtained with HindIII were clearly distinct from those of E. coli strains.