Development of genotyping method of the glanders causative agent based on multiple locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis

The aim was to develop a short MLVA-typing scheme of the causative agent of glanders and to assess the possibility of its use for differentiation of Burkholderia mallei strains and study their genetic polymorphism. Materials and methods . The study was carried out on 14 B. mallei strains from the collection of the Volgograd Research Institute for Plague Control and 12 whole genome sequences of the B. mallei strains presented in GenBank NCBI. A set of 32 loci proposed for differentiation of the melioidosis pathogen was used to select VNTR-loci for typing the causative agent of glanders. Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, sequencing, and fragment analysis were applied to detect the size of the VNTR fragments. Results . VNTR loci 993, 3145, 3652, 20, 2862, and 1217, which were selected as the most variable among the causative agent of glanders, were included in the final MLVA typing scheme. The parameters of setting and detecting the results of MLVA typing have been optimized. Conclusion . Analisys of the typing results of 26 B. mallei strains showed a high discriminating power of the developed method of intraspecies differentiation of glanders pathogen based on 6-loci MLVA-scheme and the prospects of its use for epidemiological investigation to determine the source of the glanders outbreak.