Abstract

Early and effective diagnosis of infectious diseases of bacterial origin is a critical key in the management of public health. In hospitals, accurate identification of bacterial isolates is an essential task for the microbiological control. Small subunit ribosomal RNA gene (16S rDNA) sequence analysis is usually used for the identification and classification of bacteria. To evaluate the accuracy of 16S rDNA gene sequencing in the identification of bacteria, 58 clinical and hospital environmental isolates were identified by both conventional and molecular techniques. The comparison between the conventional identification and the 16S rDNA gene sequence identifications showed that the genus identification overlapped for both methodologies in 93.1% of the cases and the species identification in 60.34% of the cases, 16S rDNA gene sequencing had a high percent accuracy as compared to the conventional methods. The obtained results suggest that combination of conventional methods and 16S rDNA gene sequencing provide a more accurate identification of clinical and environmental bacteria to enhance the human health management.

Key words: Clinical bacteria, conventional identification, 16S ribosomal RNA, DNA sequencing.