Diarrhoea in developing countries is caused by an increasingly long list of bacterial, viral, and parasitic pathogens with rotavirus, Enterotoxigenic Escherichiacoli, Campylobacter, Shigella, and Salmonella heading the list. Using methods to detect most of the known enteropathogens, one or more enteropathogen(s) is isolated in two-thirds of diarrhoeal illnesses in the developing world. Deoxyribonucleic acid probes have proved very useful in detecting pathogens such as enterotoxigenic (ETEC),

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... eroinvasive (EIEC), enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC), and Shigella but have not yet proved to be particularly rapid or less expensive. Molecular biology has proved useful in epidemiological studies as a means of strain identification and detection of genome diversity. Since the introduction of ribonucleic acid gene restriction patterns as taxonomic tools in 1986, ribotyping has become an established method for systematics, epidemiological, ecological population and genome diversity studies of microorganisms including Shigella. The technological development culminated in the automation of ribotyping which allowed for high-throughput applications. PCR ribotyping has proved being a highly discriminatory, flexible, robust and cost-efficient routine technique which makes inter-laboratory comparison and build of ribotype databases possible, too. The aim of the present review is to determine the present status of ribotyping technique in detecting the diversity in Shigella isolates.