Abstract

The study was conducted in A/ Sidery Hospital Al-Jouf province, Saudi Arabia during, the period September 2008 to May 2009. A total of 930 patients attended the Hospital for routine investigations were screened for urinary tract infection. A total of nine hundred and thirty urine specimens were received in the laboratory for culture, 640 specimens showed significant growth from which 100 Staphylococcus aureus species were recovered. Disk diffusion method and BD phoenix TM system antibiotic susceptibility were used, 15 methicillin resistant S. aureus isolates were identified, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to amplify both the S. aureus specific sequence gene and mecA gene with the amplicon size of 107 and 532 bp. All the isolates (n = 100) expressed S. aureus specific sequence gene in their PCR products. The results of the PCR revealed 13/15 isolates demonstrating both resistance to methicillin and expression of mecA gene, while the remaining two showed the resistance to methicillin by the disc diffusion method without the expression of mecA gene. All the isolates (n=100) were sensitive to vancomycin.

Key words: mecA, MRSA, methicillin resistance polymerase chain reaction (PCR),Staphylococcus aureus, Al-Jouf, Saudi Arabia.