Abstract
Staphylococcus aureus has been described as the most common cause of human and animal diseases and has emerged as superbug due to multidrug resistance. Considering these, a total of 175 samples were collected from pyogenic cases of humans (75) and animals (100), to establish the drug resistance pattern and also for molecular characterization of human and animal isolates. Thermonuclease (nuc) gene amplification was used to confirm all presumptive S. aureus isolates and then antibiotic sensitivity and slide coagulase tests were used for phenotypic characterization of isolates. Following that, all of the isolates were subjected to PCR amplification to detect the existence of the methicillin resistance (mecA) and coagulase (coa) genes. Lastly, typing was done by using the Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA-PCR. The overall prevalence of S. aureus in human and animal samples was found to be 39.4%. Drug sensitivity revealed the highest resistance against the β-lactam antibiotics such as ampicillin (94.8%) and penicillin (90.6%), followed by cephalosporin (cefixime-67.7%) and quinolone (ciprofloxacin-52.1%) group of drugs. The drug sensitivity was the highest against antibiotics like chloramphenicol (95%) followed by gentamicin (90%). Among the 69 S. aureus isolates, the overall presence of MRSA was 40.5% (27.5% and 50% in human and animal isolates respectively). Total 33 isolates exhibited coa genes amplification of more than one amplicons and variable in size of 250, 450, 800, and 1100 bp. The RAPD typing revealed amplification of 5 and 6 different band patterns in humans and animals, respectively, with two common patterns suggesting a common phylogenetic profile.
Rapid antibiotic susceptibility phenotypic characterization of Staphylococcus aureus using automated microscopy of small numbers of cells
