Abstract
Vibrio parahaemolyticus belongs to the halophilic genus of Vibrionaceae family that inhabits coastal and marine environments and is a major food-borne pathogen. In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Saudi Arabia in particular, there is a lack of information regarding the detection of pandemic clone or serovariants of V. parahaemolyticus pandemic clones. Here, 400 seawater samples were collected and examined for the presence of V. parahaemolyticus from 10 locations along the coast of Eastern Province in Saudi Arabia. The recovered isolates were serotyped, and studied for antimicrobial resistance, virulence genes, and markers of pandemicity using PCR and Arbitrarily primed (AP)-PCR typing patterns. All 40 isolates were tested negative for tdh, trh, and toxRS genes. Six serotypes were identified and three were clinically significant. Antibiotic susceptibility testing of isolates revealed high resistance towards penicillins, cephalosporins, and polymyxin; 60% of isolates were multi-drug resistant, whereas all isolates were susceptible to quinolones, carbapenems, sulfonamides, and tetracycline. The multiple antibiotic resistance (MAR) index among antibiotic resistance patterns of isolates revealed that 12 (30%) isolates had recorded significant MAR index higher than 0.2. AP-PCR fingerprinting could group all isolates into five distinct and identical pattern clusters with more than 85% similarity. Our findings demonstrate that pandemic serovariants of pandemic clones were not exclusively limited to strains isolated from fecal specimens of infected patients. Nine environmental strains of serotype O1:KUT, O1: K25, and O5:K17 were isolated from costal seawater, and thus the spread of these serovariants strains of pandemic clone of V. parahaemolyticus in the environment is to avoid any kind of threat to public health.