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ABSTRACTIn the summer of 2003 a community-acquired outbreak of Legionella pneumophilaoccurred in Rome, Italy. Three molecular typing methods, pulse-field gel electrophoresis, amplified fragment length polymorphism analysis, and sequence-based typing (SBT), were used to establish the clonal correlation among the isolates of the epidemic cluster. By comparison of the methods, SBT was the most rapid and the easiest to perform and provided unambiguous results.

ABSTRACTMutations of rpoBassociated with rifampin resistance were studied in 37 multidrug-resistant (MDR) clinical strains ofMycobacterium tuberculosisisolated in Italy. At least one mutated codon was found in each MDR strain. It was always a single-base substitution leading to an amino acid change. Nine differentrpoBalleles, three of which had not been reported before, were found. The relative frequencies of specific mutations in this sample were different from those previously reported from different geographical areas, since 22 strains (59.5%) carried the mutated codon TTG in position 531 (Ser?Leu) and 11 (29.7%) had GAC in position 526 (His?Asp).