Epidemiology and Infection

Table of Contents - 2002 - Volume 129, Issue 02  


Short Report

Nucleotide substitutions in vanC-2 gene of Enterococcus casseliflavus isolates obtained from chickens

T.  MURASE  a1 c1 , Y.  MITO  a1 , K.  OTSUKI  a1 , R.  SUZUKI  a2 and S.  YAMAI  a2
a1 Department of Veterinary Microbiology, Faculty of Agriculture, Tottori University, 4-101 Koyama, Tottori 680-8553, Japan
a2 Department of Bacteriology and Pathology, Kanagawa Prefectural Public Health Laboratory, Yokohama 241-0815, Japan

Abstract

DNA sequencing of the vanC-2 gene was partially carried out on 10 isolates of Enterococcus casseliflavus obtained from 8 samples of imported chickens in Japan between July 1999 and June 2001 to evaluate the variation in the gene. Forty nucleotide substitutions in 36 codons were identified within 345 base pairs when compared with the vanC-2 sequence of the reference strain E. casseliflavus ATCC25788. Identical nucleotide substitutions were commonly found in the isolates recovered from chickens imported from both Brazil and China. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns of NotI-digested chromosomal DNA of these strains were distinguished by two, or more than six, band differences. These observations suggest that sequencing of the vanC-2 gene may be helpful for epidemiological investigation in combination with the PFGE analyses of the isolates, although particular genotypes are unlikely to be restricted to each of the countries that exported chickens.

(Accepted May 28 2002)


Correspondence:
c1 Author for correspondence.

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