Background:
@EN Urinary tract infections(UTIs) are very common, especially in women. Escherichia coli has been recognized as an major etiologic agent in up to 70% of cases for various UTIs including asymptomatic bacteriuria, acute cystitis. and acute
pyelonedhritis. Recurrent infections after the completion of antibiotic therapy can beeither due to incomplete eradication of the originally infecting strain of to reinfection with a new strain, as judged by species identification, serotyping,
plasmid
typing, and antibiogram. Recently, genotyping methods such as ribotyping are widely used as a molecular tool to the epidemilolgic study. To assess the ribotyping as a epidemiologic tool for urinary tract infections, we compared the ribotyping,
plasmid
typing and antibiogram in discriminating E. coli strains isolated from patients with UTI.
@ES Methods:
@EN A total of 32 E. coli isolates(10 from 8 patients with asymptomatic bacteriuria, 12 from 9 patients with acute cystitis, 10 from 10 patients of acute pyelonephritis) were examined. For ribotyping anaivsis, we used two retriction enzymes,
Ecolu
and
SmaI, and DIG-labelled rRNA genes as a DNA probe.
@ES Results:
@EN Thirty-two isolates could be classified into 13 ribotypes. The typeability of E. co. strains and its reproducibility by ribotyping reached 100%. While plasmids were isolated from 72% oi E. coli strains and plasmid analysis showed 13 different
pattems. Two isolates from one patient with acute pyelonephritis and three isolates from other patient with acute pyelonephritis revealed the same ribotype and plasmid pattem. In spite that the discriminating ability of ribotyping and plasmid
typing is
better than that of antibiogram, plasmids were not present in some E. coli isolates.
@ES Conclusion:
@EN From the good discriminating ability for all isolates. ribotyping may be useful for an epidemiologic investigation of recurrent UTI due to E. coli.
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