The Consequences of Genome Instability and Clonality to Genotypic Identification of Campylobacter jejuni

摘要

The application of genetic techniques for strain identification is potentially hampered by frequent occurrence of recombination and transformation events in the Campylobacter jejuni population. The consequences of DNA transfer and recombinations to the clonal structure of the population, as determined by MLST, is discussed. The different mechanisms that can result in instability of genotype, and the consequences to molecular epidemiology is also treated. It can be concluded that recombinations, either occurring with or without DNA transfer, are probably infrequent in small-scale, real-time epidemiological studies. Their accumulative effects become more apparent when bacterial populations are compared in general. Key words campylobacter; genome stability; DNA transfer; MLST technique; molecular epidemiology