Genetic diversity among clinical isolates of Candida glabrata analyzed by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA and multilocus enzyme electrophoresis analyses

The genetic diversity of 47 clinical and reference strains of Candida glabrata from several geographical origins and diverse clinical disorders, with different antifungal susceptibilities, as well as their genetic relationships were studied through multilocus enzyme electrophoresis (MLEE) and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) techniques. The genetic diversity estimated for 11 MLEE loci measured as average heterozygosity (h) was 0.055. A high level of genetic relatedness among isolates was established by cluster analysis. Forty-nine RAPD markers were analyzed, and the average genetic diversity among isolates, estimated by Shannon's index (Ho), was 0.372. The PhiST values estimated through an analysis of molecular variance to assess genetic differentiation among isolates revealed no genetic differentiation among them. Our results revealed very low genetic diversity among isolates, a lack of differentiation, and no association with their geographic origin and the clinical characteristics.