It is also essential to identify the presence of

Brucella strains that can affect livestock populations and new strains that were previously considered to be exotic [10], thus improving the outcomes of the national brucellosis eradication programme. Although brucellosis has been eradicated in selleck chemicals llc Northern Europe, Australia, the USA and Canada, this disease remains endemic in most areas of the world [11]. Therefore, the knowledge of the prevailing genotypes of Brucella spp. present in a country is an important epidemiological tool to assess the necessary steps required for the formulation of policies and strategies for the control of brucellosis in animal populations. In addition, Brucella spp. represent potential biological warfare agents due to the high contagious rates for humans and animals, the non-specific symptoms associated with the infection, and the fact that the organism Selleckchem Veliparib can be readily aerosolized [12–14]. Therefore, the discrimination between natural outbreaks and/or intentional release of micro-organism agents may be of crucial importance in the context of the bioterrorism. Brucella species are characterised by >80% interspecies homology by DNA-DNA hybridization studies [15, 16] and >98% sequence similarity by comparative genomics [17]. In fact,

the sequencing of 16 S rRNA showed a 100% of identity between all of the Brucella spp. [18]. The simple identification of genus and, in some cases, species by PCR assays [19, 20], is adequate for purposes as diagnosis of human/animal disease or identification of food contamination but not for the tracing of outbreaks or bioterrorist attack. Therefore, the development of strain typing methods is essential in order to investigate the source of an epidemic event. Molecular Clomifene DNA technology such as repetitive intergenic palindromic sequence-PCR (REP-PCR) [21], random amplified polymorphic DNA-PCR (RAPD-PCR) [22], arbitrary primed-PCR (AP-PCR) [23], amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) [24], single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) [25, 26], and polymerase

chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) [27] has been employed to sub-type Brucella spp. In the last years the variable www.selleckchem.com/products/anlotinib-al3818.html number of tandem repeats (VNTR), allelic hypervariability related to variation in the number of tandemly repeated sequences, were used for the discrimination of bacterial species that display very little genomic diversity. Polymorphic tandem repeat loci have been identified by analysing published genome sequences of B. melitensis 16 M, B. suis 1330, and B. abortus 9-941 [16, 28]. Schemes based on multiple locus VNTR analysis (MLVA) were tested. In Brucella, MLVA schemes with 21 loci (MLVA-21), 15 and 16 loci (MLVA-15 and MLVA-16) were published [12, 16, 29].