Genotyping of clinical and environmental Aspergillus flavus isolates from Iran using microsatellites.

Aspergillus flavus is the second most important Aspergillus species causing human infections in tropical countries. Despite an increasing number of infections of A. flavus in Iran, the molecular epidemiology of clinical and environmental strains has not been well studied. We used a panel of nine microsatellite markers to analyse the genetic relatedness of A. flavus. Microsatellite typing of 143 (n = 119 clinical and n = 24 environmental) isolates demonstrated 118 different genotypes. A possible outbreak at a pulmonary ward was discovered. The discriminatory power for the individual markers ranged from 0.4812 to 0.9457 and the panel of all nine markers combined yielded a diversity index of 0.9948. This high-resolution typing method assists in better understanding of the molecular epidemiology of A. flavus.