Research article

MOLECULAR IDENTIFICATION OF BACTERIA ISOLATED FROM HEALTHY STUDENTS IN WASIT PROVINCE, IRAQ

Kawakb K. Rashid 1*, Salem AL-Aidy 2, Abdul Basit Abdul 3

Online First: December 18, 2022


Four hundred fifty (450) students, 30 students from each college of different grades were randomly selected to participate in the study. Samples obtained from both sex male (205) and female (245) with age ranged 18-28 years. All the invited students were Questionnaire for age, stage of study, college, habit. This observational study was carried out in the Department of Microbiology at AL-Shaheed Fairoz General Hospital during January 2022 to July 2022. Samples were collected from both the hands. The hands of the selected students were intact without any injuries or scratches and hadn’t been exposed to any type of disinfectants before collection of samples.‏ The swabs were collected by using transport swabs then transported to the laboratory to be inoculated directly on blood agar medium and incubated at 37ºC for 24 hours to study characteristic of growing colonies and capability of blood hemolysis, then a smear were prepared from part of colony and stained with gram stain for the primary identification of those doubted to be gram positive or gram negative bacteria. After that, it was transported to selective medium and incubated) aerobically at 37°C for 24 hours. The identification of isolated pathogenic bacteria from hand swabs of university students reports that Staphylococcus aureus is the most prevalent microorganism, with 35 isolates (22.15%), followed by E coli with 11 isolates (6.96%), Hemolytic staphylococcus with 4 samples (2.53%). Isolation was obtained for Pseudomonas aeruginosa with 6 isolates (3.80%). Susceptibility tests were performed using disk diffusion test to detect antibiotic resistance using 14 different antibiotics for each isolates, most of them were multidrug resistance bacteria. The positive samples screened by phenotypic microbiological, biochemical tests, the Vietk 2 system and for more identification and limitation of isolates the 16S rRNA of genes sequencing was applied by PCR amplification assay

Keywords

University students, Hand swabs, Pathogenic bacteria, Antimicrobal susceptibility, 16S rRNA gene, PCR amplification assay