| Affiliation: | (1) Bacterial Diseases of Livestock Research Unit, United States Department of Agriculture, National Animal Disease Center, Agricultural Research Service, 2300 Dayton Rd, 50010 Ames, IA, USA;(2) Diagnostic Bacteriology Laboratory,United States Department of Agriculture, National Veterinary Services Laboratories, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, 1800 Dayton Rd, 50010 Ames, IA, USA |
| Abstract: | Background A fundamental question that arises during epidemiological investigations of bacterial disease outbreaks is whether the outbreak strain is genetically related to a proposed index strain. Highly discriminating genetic markers for characterizing bacterial strains can help in clarifying the genetic relationships among strains. Under the auspices of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, the European Study Group for Epidemiological Markers (ESGEM) established guidelines for evaluating the performance of typing systems based of a number of criteria. Recently, HOOF-Print genotype analysis, a new method for typing Brucella abortus strains based on hypervariability at eight tandem repeat loci, was described. This paper evaluates the HOOF-Print assay by four of the criteria set out by the ESGEM: typeability, reproducibility, power of discrimination, and concordance with other typing methods. |
