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Background: We investigated the usefulness of infrequent-restriction-site polymerase chain reaction (IRS-PCR) compared with pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST) on the molecular epidemiologic analysis of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Materials and Methods: We used fifty clinical isolates of MRSA collected from 10 university hospitals located in Seoul. We performed three procedures on these isolates: PFGE using Sma I, IRS-PCR using XbaI-Hha I or Eag I-Hha I, and MLST using seven house-keeping genes. We determined the clusters of molecular types by dendrogram using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) and Dice coefficients Results: MLST analysis showed that isolates exhibited ST1, ST5, ST72, ST89, and ST239. In PFGE, the isolates clustered into 5 major groups with 80% similarity,which subsequently became classified into 18 subgroups with 95% similarity. In IRS-PCR using EagI-HhaI restriction enzymes, there was little resolution among the patterns of isolates. However, Xba I-Hha I IRS-PCR showed 5 groups with a 90%similarity. These groups were then classified into 9 subgroups with a 95% similarity. There were no significant differences among the isolates from different hospitals. Conclusions: The XbaI-Hha I IRS-PCR method could be a useful tool in the molecular epidemiology of MRSA. Its resolution power was good enough to analyze isolates, because the patterns of IRS-PCR were closely correlated with those of MLST and showed diverse groups.
