Abstract: Bacillus cereus is a food-borne opportunistic pathogen widely present in the environment and foods. It is frequently associated with two types of food-borne illness: emesis and diarrhea. The study on Bacillus cereus typing has important implications for the prevention, early warning, tracing and molecular epidemiological survey of Bacillus cereus. Currently, the popular methods for typing Bacillus cereus include traditional typing methods such as phage typing and biochemical typing, and molecular typing methods such as multilocus sequence typing, repetitive sequence-PCR, random amplified polymorphic DNA, and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis. In this paper, all these methods are reviewed with the aim of providing references for the typing of Bacillus cereus.

Key words: Bacillus cereus, traditional typing methods, molecular typing methods