Dear Juan, if you mean identifying clusters of infections by use of PCR-ribotyping, the key reference seems to be Bidet P, Barbut F, Lalande V, Burghoffer B, Petit JC: Development of a new PCR-ribotyping method for Clostridium difficile based on ribosomal RNA gene sequencing. FEMS Microbiol Lett 1999, 175:261-266. Articles such as Faires et al. 2014 - BMC Infectious Diseases 14:254 online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/14/254 use the system and refer to a definitive nomenclature; this is described by Stubbs et al. J Clin Microbiol. Feb 1999; 37(2): 461–463..

Juan, if you mean a system for clustering "conventional" ribotypes - the sort now produced semi-automatedly using the Riboprinter - that is a different question. You would need to adapt analytical clustering parameters according to how data was produced, its reproducibility and ensure you had runs set up to do the comparison appropriately. The program Bionumerics is the most well established for this type of analysis and the manual gives many tips on how to set appropriate parameters. They also give training courses. I hope this information helps you in some way. Good luck!

Hi,

the typing possibilities of C. difficile are nicely described here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23369393

In the first step of typing I use ribotypping (capillary based)

if you need to investigate genetic relatedness between isolates of the same ribotype I use MLVA

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17166961

further method is MLST typing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20042623

but some ribotypes can belonge to the same sequence type.

Of course WGS is also the option but more expensive and you have to have bioinformatics skills.