Research Information System
Problems of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases, vol.40, no.2, pp.5-11, 2012 (Scopus)
Pertussis is one of the major vaccine - preventable diseases with global distribution. In recent years the world has seen an increase in both the total number of cases and in those resulting in death of newborns. The purpose of this paper is to present the development of a new method for MLVA typing of B. pertussis applicable both to pure cultures and clinical samples. A new VNTR locus VNTR11 is described and evaluated for typing of B. pertussis. VNTR11 is characterized by seven alleles and seems to be to be highly polymorphic and hence useful for typing. In addition we have modified the method with the usage of unlabeled primers as to be applicable to agarose electrophoresis. From the 51 samples tested, 32 MLVA genotypes were registered. The results obtained by using this method show that the B. pertussis strains circulating in Bulgaria during the last decade are genetically similar but somewhat divergent from the strain used for the production of the whole cell vaccine in Bulgaria.