Gene sak0192 of Streptococcus agalactiae
Contains Direct Repeats and Spacers Serving
as Genetic Markers Characterizing the Strains

A. V. Dmitriev^a, A. D. Shen^b, and A. A. Totolian^a

^a Institute of Experimental Medicine, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

^b Beijing Children’s Hospital Affiliated to Capital University of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China

Received January 9, 2007

Abstract—A new method of strain differentiation in Streptococcus agalactiae is proposed in this work. It is
based on revealing the polymorphism of structure of gene sak0192 encoding a hypothetical protein, which in
different strains of Str. agalactiae contains a different number of regularly alternating repeats and spacer sites
having sizes of 16 and 44 bp, respectively. The sequences of forward repeats are mostly identical, while spacers
are characterized with expressed heterogeneity. In general, the structure of gene sak0192 is similar to one of
sites with direct repeats and spacers in genomes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Str. pyogenes. The possi-
bility of using polymorphism of sak0192 in both identification of species affiliation and intraspecific differen-
tiation of Str. agalactiae strains is demonstrated.

DOI:10.3103/S0891416807040076

Pleiades Publishing home page | journal home page | top

If you have any problems with this server, contact webmaster.