MOLECULAR EPIDEMIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF BLOODSTREAM ISOLATES OF Candida albicans

Abstract

Candidemia is generally related to the endogenous flora, however exogenous infection originated from hospital staff or from the environment has occurred. The randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) method can reveal strain specific variation. In this study, we used a RAPD assay to assess genetic diversity among Candida albicans isolates to find the relatedness between DNA patterns of the strains recovered from clinical and environment samples from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in the Hospital das Clínicas of the Universidade Federal de Goiás. The primers named Cnd3 (5´-CCAGATGCAC-3`) and Cnd4 (5’-ACGGTACACT-3`) were used as single primers in the PCR. RAPD profiles from both blood and urine from the same patients were identical in almost all the samples studied, except in one patient. The bed of this patient had the same genotype from his blood. Although most of C. albicans isolates probably had had an endogenous origin, the finding of isolates from the patients with the same profile as the environment isolates suggest that the candidemia may have resulted from an exogenous source.