Molecular typing techniques make it possible to genetically characterize Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates.
Conventional typing techniques may not detect new clonal variants that underlie changes in epidemiology or clinical phenotype.
Therefore, the development of typing techniques that allow discrimination at the strain level will provide an essential tool for those working with T. delbrueckii strains.
Molecular typing techniques have allowed detailed phylogenetic studies.
Currently available typing techniques are either resource-intensive or have limited discriminatory ability.
Many typing techniques have been employed for the analysis of S. aureus.
Various M. tuberculosis families, such as the Beijing family, have been defined using these typing techniques [3].
This general dependence among typing methods supports the validity of the concept behind the use of typing techniques to infer relationships between microbial strains.
Available HLA typing techniques, that provide the 4-digit level resolution needed to interpret immune responses, lack sufficient throughput for large immunoepidemiological studies.
However, the most widely used molecular typing techniques for S. aureus are PFGE [20], [21], MLST [21], [22] and spa-sequence typing [23], [24].
Unfortunately, due to different choices of typing techniques and strains between studies, we are not able to match these genogroups to our clonal complexes.
