Helicobacter pylori infects a significant proportion of the world population and it is associated with pathologies which include chronic atrophic gastritis, peptic ulcer, and gastric neoplasias such as gastric adenocarcinoma and MALT lymphoma. Costa Rica has a high prevalence of the infection and an elevated incidence of gastric cancer and its associated mortality. The global population structure for H. pylori has been established using a MLST scheme. The population structure of the strains of H. pylori circulating in Costa Rica is currently unknown. We characterized the geographical origin of 24 H. pylori isolates from Costa Rican patients. We identified 142 new alleles for the genes included in the scheme and in eight of the 24 isolates from Costa Rican patients, all seven alleles sequenced were described for the first time. Twenty-one isolates from Costa Rican patients group with hpEurope strains and the remaining three isolates grouped with hspWAfrica isolates (Bayesian posterior probability values above 0.70, P = 0.05, after 2 000 000 generations). The obtained result in the MLST analysis was not unexpected and reflects the genetic composition of the Costa Rican population.
Keywords: Costa Rica; Helicobacter pylori; MLST; alleles; phylogeny.