Fingerprinting of MRSA using rep-PCR

Molecular epidemiological methods have been proven to be cost-effective for surveillance and study of nosocomial outbreaks. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) is the gold standard for molecular epidemiology studies but repetitive element sequence-based polymerase chain reaction (rep-PCR) could be an alternative in view that it has the same discriminatory power but is more rapid, easier and cheaper to do. The aim of this study was to study the genetic relatedness among the MRSA strains that were collected from patients in the general intensive care unit at a tertiary hospital.