AUTHOR=Luo Yun , Huang Chen , Ye Julian , Octavia Sophie , Wang Huanying , Dunbar Sherry A. , Jin Dazhi , Tang Yi-Wei , Lan Ruiting TITLE=Comparison of xMAP Salmonella Serotyping Assay With Traditional Serotyping and Discordance Resolution by Whole Genome Sequencing JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology VOLUME=10 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-and-infection-microbiology/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2020.00452 DOI=10.3389/fcimb.2020.00452 ISSN=2235-2988 ABSTRACT=

Salmonella spp. are a major cause of foodborne illness throughout the world. Traditional serotyping by antisera agglutination has been used as a standard identification method for many years but newer nucleic acid-based tests have become available that may provide advantages in workflow and test turnaround time. In this study, we evaluated the Luminex® xMAP® Salmonella Serotyping Assay (SSA), a multiplex nucleic acid test capable of identifying 85% of the most common Salmonella serotypes, in comparison to the traditional serum agglutination test (SAT) on 4 standard strains and 255 isolates from human (224), environmental, and food (31) samples. Of the total of 259 isolates, 256 could be typed by the SSA. Of these, 197 (77.0%) were fully typed and 59 (23.0%) were partially typed. By SAT, 246 of the 259 isolates (95%) were successfully typed. Sixty isolates had discrepant results between SAT and SSA and were resolved using whole genome sequencing (WGS). By SAT, 80.0% (48/60) of the isolates were consistent with WGS while by SSA 91.7% (55/60) were partially consistent with WGS. By serovar, all 30 serovars except one tested were fully or partially typable. The workflow comparison showed that SSA provided advantages over SAT with a hands-on time (HOT) of 3.5 min and total turnaround time (TAT) of 6 h, as compared to 1 h HOT and 2–6 days TAT for SAT. Overall, this study showed that molecular serotyping is promising as a rapid method for Salmonella serotyping with good accuracy for typing most common Salmonella serovars circulating in China.