Nontoxigenic Clostridium difficile protects hamsters against challenge with historic and epidemic strains of toxigenic BI/NAP1/027 C. difficile.

Nontoxigenic Clostridium difficile (NTCD) has been shown to prevent fatal C. difficile infection in the hamster model when hamsters are challenged with standard toxigenic C. difficile strains.

Toxinotype V Clostridium difficile in humans and food animals.

Clostridium difficile is a recognized pathogen in neonatal pigs and may contribute to enteritis in calves. Toxinotype V strains have been rare causes of human C. difficile-associated disease (CDAD).

Infection of hamsters with historical and epidemic BI types of Clostridium difficile.

Background: North American and European hospitals have reported outbreaks of Clostridium difficile-associated disease with unexpectedly high mortality caused by a newly recognized group of C. difficile strains, group BI. Our objective was to compare, in hamsters, the virulence of a historical nonepidemic BI type, BI1, with that of 2 recent epidemic BI types, BI6 and BI17, and with that of 2 standard toxigenic strains, K14 and 630.

Comparison of seven techniques for typing international epidemic strains of Clostridium difficile: restriction endonuclease analysis, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, PCR-ribotyping, multilocus sequence typing, multilocus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis, amplified fragment length polymorphism, and surface layer protein A gene sequence typing.

Using 42 isolates contributed by laboratories in Canada, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we compared the results of analyses done with seven Clostridium difficile typing techniques: multilocus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis (MLVA), amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP), surface layer protein A gene sequence typing (slpAST), PCR-ribotyping, restriction endonuclease analysis (REA), multilocus sequence typing (MLST), and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). We assessed the discriminating ability and typeability of each technique as well as the agreement among techniques in grouping isolates by allele profile A (AP-A) through AP-F, which are defined by toxinotype, the presence of the binary toxin gene, and deletion in the tcdC gene. We found that all isolates were typeable by all techniques and that discrimination index scores for the techniques tested ranged from 0.