Li W. J. auteur aut IRD Raoult Didier auteur aut IRD Fournier P. E. auteur aut IRD text journalArticle eng text/pdf born digital access Bacterial strain typing, or identifying bacteria at the strain level, is particularly important for diagnosis, treatment, and epidemiological surveillance of bacterial infections. This is especially the case for bacteria exhibiting high levels of antibiotic resistance or virulence, and those involved in nosocomial or pandemic infections. Strain typing also has applications in studying bacterial population dynamics. Over the last two decades, molecular methods have progressively replaced phenotypic assays to type bacterial strains. In this article, we review the current bacterial genotyping methods and classify them into three main categories: (1) DNA banding pattern-based methods, which classify bacteria according to the size of fragments generated by amplification and/or enzymatic digestion of genomic DNA, (2) DNA sequencing-based methods, which study the polymorphism of DNA sequences, and (3) DNA hybridization-based methods using nucleotidic probes. We described and compared the applications of genotyping methods to the study of bacterial strain diversity. We also discussed the selection of appropriate genotyping methods and the challenges of bacterial strain typing, described the current trends of genotyping methods, and investigated the progresses allowed by the availability of genomic sequences. specialized genotyping bacteria genome DNA 020 084 33 5 892-916 2009 0168-6445 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010046255 10.1111/j.1574-6976.2009.00182.x 0168-6445 [F B010046255] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010046255 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/intranet/publi/2009/08/010046255.pdf Accès réservé (Intranet de l'IRD) IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2009-09-01 2017-08-23 fdi:010046255 fre