Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Escherichia coli (E. coli) is the most common cause of urinary infections in hospitals. The aim of this study was to evaluate the ERIC-PCR method for molecular typing of uropathogenic E. coli strains isolated from hospitalized patients. METHODS: In a cross sectional study, 98 E. coli samples were collected from urine samples taken from patients admitted to Baqiyatallah Hospital from June 2014 to January 2015. The disk agar diffusion method was used to determine antibiotic sensitivity. DNA proliferation based on repetitive intergenic consensus was used to classify the E. coli strains. The products of proliferation were electrophoresed on 1.5 agarose gel, and their dendrograms were drawn. The data were analyzed by online Insillico software. RESULTS: The method used in this research proliferated numerous bands (4-17 bands), ranging from 100 to 3000 base pairs. The detected strains were classified into six clusters (E1-E6) with 70 similarity between them. CONCLUSION: In this study, uropathogenic E. coli strains belonged to different genotypic clusters. It was found that ERIC-PCR had good differentiation power for molecular typing of uropathogenic E. coli strains isolated from the patients in the study.