eng Oriental Scientific Publishing Company Biomedical and Pharmacology Journal 0974-6242 2020-06-25 13 2 737 746 10.13005/bpj/1939 33475 article Suha Abed 1 Akeel Assie 1 Khaled Abu-Elteen 2 Batol Dheeb 3 Luay Abu-Qatouseh 4 Department of Biology, College of Science, Tikrit University, Salaheldin, Iraq Department of Biology and Biotechnology, Faculty of Science, Hashemite University, Jordan Department of Pathological Analysis, College of Applied Science, Samarra University, Iraq Faculty of Pharmacy, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Petra, Jordan The present study is conducted to investigatethe relatedness and genomic variability between strains of methicillin-resistant and methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus.A total of 100 isolatescollected from different human skin infection and used a combination of morphological and molecular techniques to identify ten of these as Methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA), and ten as Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). The MRSA and MSSA samples were subjected to genetic characterization with the use of the Random Amplificationof Polymorphic DNA technique (RAPD) using 10 primers.The DNA profile of the samples wereobtained and showed that the number of the bands and banding patterns varied depending upon the primers used. A two-dimensional binary matrix was constructed through scoring the presence or absence of a band at any position on the gel. A total of 142 bands were generated per the 10 primers, of which 141 ranged between 3100-100 bp. Primers OPJ-13 and OPE-16 exhibited the largest number of bands (20) with a 100% polymorphism and the greatest discriminatory index power (DI, 14.1), while primer OPI- 06 produced the lowest number of bandsand a comparably lower level of discrimination (DI, 7.09).Data in this study demonstrate the ability of the RAPD analysis to differentiate between strains at the intraspecies level. Data also suggest that this technique can be applied successfully to assess the genetic backgrounds among isolates. https://biomedpharmajournal.org/vol13no2/molecular-characterization-of-methicillin-resistant-and-methicillin-susceptible-staphylococcus-aureusisolates-obtained-from-human-skin-samples-in-iraq/ Methicillin-Resistant Methicillin-Susceptible Random Amplification of Polymorphic DNA Staphylococcus Aureus