Faster Method to Identify Salmonella Strains

A new method can reduce by more than half the time it takes health officials to identify Salmonella strains, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

Currently most public-health laboratories use a technique called pulse field gel electrophoresis, or PFGE, to subtype Salmonella strains, and it normally takes one to three days to identify a specific strain.

The new method focuses on two virulence genes and two novel regions of Salmonella DNA called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPRs. With the method, the researchers devised a form of multi-virulence-locus sequence typing, or MVLST, that can detect strain-specific differences in the DNA at these four locations.

This allows scientists to identify subtype Salmonella strains in half the time or less compared with the current methods.

For further details, refer to the following paper:

N. Shariat, M. K. Kirchner, C. H. Sandt, E. Trees, R. Barrangou, E. G. Dudley. CRISPR-MVLST Subtyping of Salmonella serovar Newport Outbreak Isolates and Determination of the Relationship Between CRISPR-MVLST and PFGE, Journal of Clinical Microbiology, 2013

Posted by Tim Sandle