Development of an HRM protocol on wzi gene for fast Klebsiella pneumoniae typing.

We designed a scheme of two HRM primer pairs on the hypervariable gene wzi of Klebsiella pneumoniae. The wzi scheme resulted to have a discriminatory power comparable to the HRM MLST scheme, using only one third of primer pairs. Then we successfully used the wzi HRM primer scheme to reconstruct a Klebsiella pneumoniae nosocomial outbreak in few hours. The use of hypervariable genes reduces the number of HRM primer pairs required for bacterial typing allowing to perform cost saving, large-scale surveillance programs. To validate HRM typing we sequenced the genome of 66 strains and compared HRM and WGS typing results.