Advance in bacterial typing methods (a review).

We give a short review about the two main groups of bacterial typing methods for epidemiological purposes: the phenotypic and genotypic methods. The advantage of the phenotypic methods is their feasibility for the less equipped laboratories, their disadvantages are the variability of the phenotypic properties, and their high labor requirement. The advantages of the genotypic typing methods are the higher discriminatory power and applicability of the same method for different species of bacteria. The disadvantage of these methods is that they are expensive and labour consuming. Beside the short description, we show the results of different authors obtained by the use of the molecular methods in the epidemiological practice and we call the attention to the insufficiency concerning the stability.