Isolation of Campylobacter concisus from feces of children with and without diarrhea

Abstract

A prospective study compared fecal isolation rates of Campylobacter concisus for children with diarrhea and without diarrhea by a filter technique in which media were incubated for 4 days in a microaerobic atmosphere. No statistically significant difference in isolation rates was found (13.2% in patients with diarrhea and 9% in controls). Moreover, 35 of 37 children attending the same day care center harbored different C. concisus strains, as was demonstrated by arbitrary primer PCR DNA fingerprinting. These data suggest a lack of a pathogenic role for C. concisus in enteritis.

Identification of taxonomic and epidemiological relationships among Campylobacter species by numerical analysis of AFLP profiles

“…Thus, C. concisus can be regarded as a`complex' species comprising at least two genomospecies. Our results suggest that AFLP pro¢le analysis has the potential to di¡erentiate C. concisus genomospecies and assist in reconciling various taxonomic and clinical issues that have been extant for some time [12,13]. However, further work involving more strains from diverse sources is needed to properly investigate this hypothesis.…”

Genetic heterogeneity of Campylobacter concisus determined by pulsed field gel electrophoresis-based macrorestriction profiling

“…Further studies are required to con¢rm if this degree of variation is commonplace among C. concisus isolates in other geographic regions. However, RAPD ¢ngerprinting has also indicated C. concisus to be highly diverse, with 49/51 strains (of which 42 isolates were obtained from stools of children attending the same day care facility in Belgium) giving unique pro¢les [6]. Moreover, estimates of the genome size of C. concisus strains varied considerably between ca.…”

“…At present, C. concisus is known to comprise at least two genomospecies, which are phenotypically indistinguishable, but genetically divergent by DNA^DNA hybridisation, and ampli¢ed fragment length polymorphism-based analyses [5,9]. Nonetheless, apart from a study in which randomly ampli¢ed polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis was used to compare C. concisus strains isolated from children with and without diarrhoea [6], limited genotyping studies have been carried out on this species. As a result, there are few data concerning the genetic diversity of C. concisus, and no established or widely available typing procedure for epidemiological investigations.…”

Taxonomy of Campylobacter, Arcobacter, Helicobacter and related bacteria: current status, future prospects and immediate concerns

“…Thus, the C. concisus-type strain and these diarrhoal isolates represent genetically distinct species, yet there are no other phenotypic or genotypic criteria to distinguish them, and C. concisus is regarded as a`complex'. The presence of C. concisus in both diarrhoea and normal faeces has been used to argue that its presence in diarrhoea is simply coincidental (Van Etterick et al 1996), or at best opportunistic (Engberg et al 2000). However, at present it cannot be determined if all the diarrhoeal strains represent a single species ± distinct from, but closely related to, the oral C. concisus strains.…”