Patent ID: 7074598

Claim:
A method for detecting the presence or absence of vancomycin-resistant enterococci in a biological sample from an individual, said method comprising: performing at least one cycling step, wherein a cycling step comprises an amplifying step and a hybridizing step, wherein said amplifying step comprises contacting said sample with a pair of vanA primers to produce a vanA amplification product if a vancomycin-resistant enterococci vanA nucleic acid molecule is present in said sample, wherein said pair of vanA primers comprises a first vanA primer and a second vanA primer, wherein said first vanA primer is no more than 30 nucleotides in length and comprises the sequence 5â€²-CGA GGA CGG ATA CAG GA-3â€² (SEQ ID NO:1), wherein said hybridizing step comprises contacting said sample with a pair of vanA probes, wherein the members of said pair of vanA probes hybridize to said amplification product within no more than five nucleotides of each other, wherein a first vanA probe of said pair of vanA probes is labeled with a donor fluorescent moiety and wherein a second vanA probe of said pair of vanA probes is labeled with a corresponding acceptor fluorescent moiety; and detecting the presence or absence of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) between said donor fluorescent moiety of said first vanA probe and said acceptor fluorescent moiety of said second vanA probe, wherein the presence of FRET is indicative of the presence of vancomycin-resistant enterococci in said biological sample, and wherein the absence of FRET is indicative of the absence of vancomycin-resistant enterococci in said biological sample.