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. 2021 Apr 8:9:e11195.
doi: 10.7717/peerj.11195. eCollection 2021.

spa diversity of methicillin-resistant and -susceptible Staphylococcus aureus in clinical strains from Malaysia: a high prevalence of invasive European spa-type t032

Sherry Usun Jones  1 , Kek Heng Chua  1 , Ching Hoong Chew  2 , Chew Chieng Yeo  3 , Fatimah Haslina Abdullah  4 , Norlela Othman  4 , Boon Pin Kee  1 , Suat Moi Puah  1
Affiliations

spa diversity of methicillin-resistant and -susceptible Staphylococcus aureus in clinical strains from Malaysia: a high prevalence of invasive European spa-type t032

Sherry Usun Jones et al. PeerJ. .

Abstract

Background: Staphylococcus aureus is one of the important pathogens causing nosocomial infection. spa typing allows identification of S. aureus clones in hospital isolates and is useful for epidemiological studies and nosocomial infection control. This study aims to investigate the spa types in Malaysian S. aureus isolates obtained from various clinical specimens.

Method: A total of 89 methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) [pus (n = 55), blood (n = 27), respiratory (n = 5), eye (n = 2)] isolates and 109 methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) [pus (n = 79), blood (n = 24), respiratory (n = 3), eye (n = 2) and urine (n = 1)] isolates were subjected to spa typing with sequences analysed using BioNumerics version 7.

Results: The spa sequence was successfully amplified from 77.8% of the strains (154/198) and 47 known spa types were detected. The distribution of known spa types in MRSA (36.2%, 17/47) was less diverse than in MSSA (70.2%, 33/47). The most predominant spa types were t032 (50%) in MRSA, and t127 (19%) and t091 (16.7%) in MSSA, respectively. spa type t091 in MSSA was significantly associated with skin and soft tissue infections (p = 0.0199).

Conclusion: The previously uncommon spa type t032 was detected in the Malaysian MRSA strains, which also corresponded to the most common spa type in Europe and Australia, and has replaced the dominant spa type t037 which was reported in Malaysia in 2010.

Keywords: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; Methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus; spa typing; t032.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare there are no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Minimum spanning tree (MST) of the clinical MRSA and MSSA strains.
MST was performed using the spa typing plug-in tool of the BioNumerics software version 7. The node distance between spa type was computed using Dice correction. Each spa type is depicted by a single node, node size is proportional to spa frequency and line length is proportional to the number of mutational steps between the types. A bin distance of 1.0 was used for the MST parameter.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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