Abele-Horn M, Vogel U, Klare I, Konstabel C, Trabold R, Kurihara R, Witte W, Kreth W, Schlegel PG, Claus H (2006): Molecular epidemiology of hospital-acquired vancomycin-resistant enterococci
J. Clin. Microbiol. 44 (11): 4009-4013. Sep 27 [Epub ahead of print].

Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium strains are a significant cause of nosocomial infections in predisposed patients. Multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis (MLVA) has recently been validated using a global strain collection. In this report, we applied MLVA together with multilocus sequence typing (MLST), and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) to type fourteen isolates from three clusters of patients colonized or infected with vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium, and another ten epidemiologically unrelated isolates from the same hospital. The clusters could be distinguished by all three typing methods, which proved to be concordant. PFGE patterns provided the highest resolution. We observed six sequence types (ST), seven MLVA types (MT) and nine distinct ST/MT combinations. The combination of MLST and MLVA may be an alternative to PFGE in hospital epidemiology providing the benefit of high accuracy, reproducibility and portability.