Optimisation of AP-PCR fingerprinting discriminatory power for clinical isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Recently methods based on analysis of arbitrarily amplified target sites of microorganism genomes have been extensively applied in microbiological studies. The range of their applications is limited by problems with discrimination and reproducibility resulting from lack of standardised and reliable methods of optimisation. By orthogonal-array optimisation most advantageous and optimal parameters for highly discriminatory primers (CagA2+CMVin2) were selected and efficient AP-PCR (arbitrarily primed-polymerase chain reaction) fingerprinting conditions for Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates were set up. Stable and multiplex amplicon profiles obtained in this study revealed high level of intraspecies DNA polymorphism among 20 analysed clinical strains of P. aeruginosa proving optimised AP-PCR fingerprinting to be useful in epidemiological typing of the species. (C) 2002 Federation of European Microbiological Societies. Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.