Molecular characteristics and proportion from different regions of Argentina of dominant community methicillin-resistant-<i>Staphylococcus aureus</i> clones.

<p><b>A</b>. PFGE pattern analysis for representative isolates belonging to the most prevalent subtypes of community-onset-MRSA clones (CA-MRSA and HA-MRSA) detected in central, eastern and northern regions of Argentina during 2007–2008. The schematic presentation of <i>SmaI</i> restriction patterns (middle) and dendrogram (left) by the unweighted-pair group method using average linkage clusterings are shown. Genotypes are denoted as subtype (by PFGE)-ST (by MLST)-SCC<i>mec</i> type-<i>spa</i> type (right). CA-MRSA clones appear in gray. The presence (+) or absence (−) of <i>pvl</i> genes (by PCR) is also indicated for each subtype; strains with and other without <i>pvl</i> genes belonging to the same PFGE subtype (I9) are indicated as +/−. The PFGE pattern of USA300-0114 (ST8-IVa-<i>t008</i>-ACME+) is shown for comparison purposes. The first (A1-ST5-I-t149-Cordobes/Chilean), second (B1-ST239-IIIA-t037-Brazilian) and third (C1-ST100-IVNv-t002-Pediatric) more frequent HA-MRSA clones in our country, detected among community-onset MRSA infections, are also shown (dotted gray). <b>B</b>: Proportion of CA-MRSA clones among representative isolates from different regions of Argentina in 2007.