Abstract
Staphylococcus aureus is an opportunistic bacterium which is carried as a normal flora organism but has a major role in the epidemiology and pathogenesis of different staphylococcal infections in humans and animals. Fifty S. aureus isolated from banknotes, foods, human infections and bovine mastitis were subjected to DNA fingerprinting by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis to examine their genotypic polymorphism and investigate the amount of genetic relatedness among these various isolates. At 100% RAPD profile similarity level, isolates were classified into four, five and seven groups of the same clone, according to the RAPDPCR with OLP6, OLP11 and OLP13 primers, respectively. Amplification of the isolates resulted in several polymorphic bands ranged from >50 to >1500 bp in size. Maximum number of bands was obtained by primer OLP13 which produced seven bands in bovine mastitis isolates. Most polymorphisms were observed in isolates of bovine mastitis and the lowest were associated with human infections isolates. There was no relationship between the RAPD patterns and the sources of isolates, except the three clusters which showed host specificity and only included the strains from the same sources. The results confirm the wide genotypic diversity of the studied S. aureus strains. RAPD-PCR technique can be a valuable tool for assessing the genetic relationship, detection of polymorphism in S. aureus and tracing the sources and management of S. aureus infections.