Abstract
Objectives
We investigated the characteristics of Streptococcus mutans in the national culture collection from Korea. Twenty-nine (dental plaque, n=27; endodontic infections, n=1; blood, n=1) isolates were included in this study.
Methods
Antimicrobial susceptibilities were tested using the disk diffusion test. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST), serotyping, and collagen-binding genes were used for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and direct sequencing. A collagen-binding (to assess the adhesion properties) assay was performed. S. mutans demonstrated high susceptibility to antimicrobial agents. Differences in collagen-binding abilities of the cnm-positive and -negative groups were compared using the Mann-Whitney U test (P<0.05).
Results
MLST analyses revealed 25 sequence types (STs), 17 of which (ST213-ST229) contained new alleles. The strains were classified into four serotypes with the c type encompassing 79.3% of all strains, while the e, f, and k types representing 6.9% each. Analysis of the cnm and cbm genes, which encode the two surface adhesin components of S. mutans, revealed three cnm-positive strains, each displaying greater adhesion ability than those of the cnm-negative strains.
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![]() | Fig. 1.Comparison of collagen-binding activities between cnm-positive (cnm+)and cnm-negative (cnm-) strains. |
Table 1.
PCR primers for S. mutans used in this study
Table 2.
Characteristics of S. mutans strains analyzed by PCR and sequencing
Bold letters indicate new alleles and sequence type (ST) registered with PubMLST for S. mutans MLST scheme in this study. tkt (#25), GenBank accession no. AB281747; gltA (#36), GenBank accession no. AB281970; gltA (#37), Genbank accession no. AB281943; gltA (#38), GenBank accession no. AB282001; aroE (#32), GenBank accession no. AB282285; lepC (#35), GenBank accession no. AB282484.