Literature Review of DNA-Based Subspecies Analysis of Bacillus Anthracis Burkholderia Pseudomallel Burkholderia Mallei, and Yersinia Pestis

摘要

The identification of DNA-based polymorphisms can be a powerful means for the subspecies identification of bacterial species. In the case of pathogens, the kind of discrimination can enable the source of an outbreak to be tracked with a certain degree of precision. The likelihood of strain identity correlates with the number of polymorphisms detected. Published references of DNA-based polymorphisms were reviewed for four human pathogens; Bacillus anthracis, Burkholderia pseudomallei, Burkholderia mallei, and Yersinia pestis. Considerable research has been accomplished for the identification of polymorphisms from the strains B. anthracis and B. pseudomallei. The B. anthracis literature includes several cases in which molecular approaches were used for the analysis of the source of the Sverdlovsk, USSR, outbreak in 1979. No references were found describing any subspecies DNA-polymorphisms for B. mallei, and only relatively few references were found describing the identification of such polymorphisms from Y. pestis.