Genotyping of Candidaalbicans isolates from oropharyngeal candidiasis in head and neck cancer patients in Iran: Molecular epidemiology and SAP2 gene expression.

Multilocus sequence typing is a powerful method for genotyping of clinical isolates of Candida albicans. Cross-contamination between the patients is an important reason for nosocomial infections. Oropharyngeal candidiasis (OPC) caused by C. albicans is an important problem in patients with head and neck cancer, in Cancer Institute of Tehran. Here we studied the endemic genotypes of C. albicans isolates and the relationship between geographic distributions, potential cross-contaminations and the expression of SAP2 gene, an important gene in oral candidiasis, with MLST groups. A total of 32 clinical strains of C. albicans isolated from head and neck cancer patients with oropharyngeal candidiasis were subjected to MLST analysis and SAP2 gene expression was analyzed by Real-time PCR. We identified 75 polymorphic sites in 7 loci of C. albicans isolates and 30 diploid sequence types which 27 of them were found as new. After eBURST analysis, our results determined that CC 124 was the most prevalent group among all CCs. SAP2 gene showed high expression in almost all OPC patients' isolates, compared to the control. We found few genetically-related as well as identical isolates among the 32 Candida strains which indicated low cross-contaminations among the patients. There was no relationship between C. albicans MLST profiles and their geographic distribution, cancer type and SAP2 gene expression. This lack of correlation was possibly due to the small understudy population; hence, finding more relevance requires studies with a higher number of samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]