Evaluation and validity of a polymerase chain reaction-based open reading frame typing method to dissect the molecular epidemiology for Acinetobacter baumannii in an epidemiologic study of a hospital outbreak.

Acinetobacter baumannii is regarded as one of the most important pathogens in hospital outbreaks. To obtain an efficient and simple epidemiologic method of surveillance during outbreaks, we assessed the applicability of the polymerase chain reaction-based open reading frames typing (POT) method and compared it with pulsed-field gel electrophoresis. The POT method was found to have sufficient discriminatory power to identify the strains and would be widely applicable to epidemiologic surveillance during hospital outbreaks.