Research article

Performance of a 70-mer oligonucleotide microarray for genotyping of Campylobacter jejuni

Sandra Rodin¹ , Anders F Andersson^{* 1,2} , Valtteri Wirta^{* 1} , Lena Eriksson¹ , Marianne Ljungström¹ , Britta Björkholm³ , Hans Lindmark⁴ and Lars Engstrand^1,3

¹Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, SE-17182 Solna, Sweden

²Limnology/Department of Ecology & Evolution, Uppsala University, Box 573, SE-75123 Uppsala, Sweden

³Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, SE-17177 Stockholm, Sweden

⁴National Food Administration, P.O. Box 622, SE-75126 Uppsala, Sweden

author email corresponding author email* Contributed equally

BMC Microbiology 2008, 8:73doi:10.1186/1471-2180-8-73

Published:	8 May 2008

Abstract

Background

Campylobacter jejuni is widespread in the environment and is the major cause of bacterial gastroenteritis in humans. In the present study we use microarray-based comparative genomic hybridizations (CGH), pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST) to analyze closely related C. jejuni isolates from chicken and human infection.

Results

With the exception of one isolate, the microarray data clusters the isolates according to the five groups determined by PFGE. In contrast, MLST defines only three genotypes among the isolates, indicating a lower resolution. All methods show that there is no inherit difference between isolates infecting humans and chicken, suggesting a common underlying population of C. jejuni. We further identify regions that frequently differ between isolates, including both previously described and novel regions. Finally, we show that genes that belong to certain functional groups differ between isolates more often than expected by chance.

Conclusion

In this study we demonstrated the utility of 70-mer oligonucleotide microarrays for genotyping of Campylobacter jejuni isolates, with resolution outperforming MLST.