RT Journal Article SR Electronic(1) A1 LEE, TSONG-MING A1 CHANG, LIN-LI A1 CHANG, CHUNG-YU A1 WANG, JINN-CHYI A1 PAN, TZU-MING A1 WANG, TIEN-KUEI A1 CHANG, SHUI-FENGYR 2000 T1 Molecular analysis of Shigella sonnei isolated from three well-documented outbreaks in school children JF Journal of Medical Microbiology, VO 49 IS 4 SP 355 OP 360 DO https://doi.org/10.1099/0022-1317-49-4-355 PB Microbiology Society, SN 1473-5644, AB Fifty-eight isolates of Shigella sonnei from three outbreaks in school children and eight control isolates from epidemiologically unrelated sporadic clinical infections in Taiwan were compared by antibiotic susceptibility testing and molecular typing. Antibiotic susceptibility testing showed that all strains except one sporadic isolate were multi-resistant. Ribotyping after restriction endonuclease digestion with SalI, PvuII and HindII generated the same ribosomal pattern in 65 of the 66 isolates. Plasmid profile analysis and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) produced eight and nine distinct patterns, respectively, and were in agreement with the epidemiological relationship of the outbreak strains. Nevertheless, some of the sporadic isolates could be discriminated only by a combination of these two methods. This study showed that plasmid profiling in combination with PFGE may be superior to ribotyping in molecular epidemiological investigations of S. sonnei. , UL https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/0022-1317-49-4-355