RESUMO
The profile of virulence genes and repetitive element sequence-based PCR (rep-PCR) genomic fingerprinting were determined on Escherichia coli strains isolated from patients with urinary tract infection to investigate genetic relatedness and its identification. Thirty nine strains of E. coli were examined genotypically by using the multiplex polymerase chain reaction for the presence of five urovirulence genes; pyelonephritis-associated pili (pap), S. fimbriae (sfa), afimbrial adhesin (afa), cytotoxic necrotizing factor (cnf ), and a-hemolysin (hly). As a result, genotype pap+sfa-afa-cnf -hly- was the most dominant (14 strains: 36%). But no urovirulence-genes were detected in 12 strains (31%). On the basis of rep-PCR, the dendrograms generated from REP-PCR and ERIC-PCR revealed that uropathogenic E. coli strains were clustered into non-uropathogenic E. coli ATCC 43894 O157:H7 with the degree of similarity 37% and 44%, respectively. On the contrary, BOX-PCR results showed that uropathogenic E. coli strains differed from non-uropathogenic E. coli ATCC 43894 O157:H7 with the degree of similarity 37%. According to these findings, REP-PCR and ERIC-PCR were unable to discriminate reliably uropathogenic E. coli from non-uropathogenic E. coli. However, BOX-PCR provided an effective mean of differentiating E. coli strains between uropathogenic and non-uropathogenic.