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Staphylococcus aureusis a common human and livestock opportunistic pathogen, and there is evidence of animal to human transmission. This paper aimed to recognize properties of the isolates from collections of human and livestock S. aureusstrains and to estimate compatibility of results based on phenotypic tests, microarrays and the spatyping methods. The second goal was to study differences between human and animal isolates in terms of specificity of their hosts and the strain transmission among various hosts. Most strains showed multi-susceptible profiles and produced enzymes on a high level, and they were phenotypically and genetically similar. However, in contrast to the Polish bovine mastitis strains, the Slovakian strains were multi-resistant. In this research, the strains showed significant differences in terms of their phenotypic manifestations and the presence of hemolysins genes; however, other enzyme-encoding genes correlated to a higher extent with the microarrays results. Interestingly, there was a lack of enterotoxin genes in human Poultry-like protein A+ strains in comparison to other human strains. Our study showed that differences between virulence profiles of the human and animal strains correlated with their origin rather than their hosts, and any trait allowed clearly distinguishing between them based on the microarray results.

Enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus-based polymerase chain reaction (ERIC-PCR) was found useful for discrimination of rumen selenomonads. Simultaneous use of ERICIR and ERIC2 primers yielded strain-specific banding patterns. The patterns were compared using Dice similarity coefficients and a DNA relatedness dendrogram based on the unweighted pair group method using arithmetic averages (UPGMA) was constructed. Five clusters and four single strains were identified at a similarity level of 50%. Very weak grouping was observed for lactilyticaand ruminantiumsubspecies ofSelenomonas ruminantium, indicating that lactate utilization has probably no taxonomic value. Restriction and modification phenotypes are weakly reflected in the dendrogram probably as the result of horizontal genetic transfer of genes encoding these phenotypic traits. While diverse in ERIC-PCR analysis, strains shown little variation in restriction fragment length polymorphism of amplified 16S-rRNA genes. All but one strain produced nearly identical profile indicating that majority of DNA diversity observed is due to epigenetic factors and not due to evolutionary divergence.

Lactobacillus gasseri4B2 is a human isolate characterised by a strong autoaggregating phenotype mediated by APF (aggregation‐promoting factor), a secreted protein. Two primer pairs were developed for simultaneous amplification of a specific fragment of the APF gene and a highly conserved region of the 16S rRNA gene. The specificity of this protocol was checked in DNA samples isolated from single and mixed cultures of Lactobacillus. The same amplification protocol was successfully used directly adding whole bacterial cells to PCR reaction tubes. The suitability of this method for in vivo studies was investigated through feeding L. gasseri4B2 to mice and analysing colony forming units obtained by plating faecal samples on selective medium. The methodology allows a fast and reliable identification of the target strain without any DNA extraction procedure.

Lactobacillus gasseri 4B2 is a human isolate characterised by a strong autoaggregating phenotype mediated by APF (aggregation-promoting factor), a secreted protein. Two primer pairs were developed for simultaneous amplification of a specific fragment of the APF gene and a highly conserved region of the 16S rRNA gene. The specificity of this protocol was checked in DNA samples isolated from single and mixed cultures of Lactobacillus. The same amplification protocol was successfully used directly adding whole bacterial cells to PCR reaction tubes. The suitability of this method for in vivo studies was investigated through feeding L. gasseri 4B2 to mice and analysing colony forming units obtained by plating faecal samples on selective medium. The methodology allows a fast and reliable identification of the target strain without any DNA extraction procedure.