Multilocus sequence typing: a portable approach to the identification of clones within populations of pathogenic microorganisms.

ABSTRACT: Traditional and molecular typing schemes for the characterization of pathogenic microorganisms are poorly portable because they index variation that is difficult to compare among laboratories. To overcome these problems, we propose multilocus sequence typing (MLST), which exploits the unambiguous nature and electronic portability of nucleotide sequence data for the characterization of microorganisms. To evaluate MLST, we determined the sequences of approximately 470-bp fragments from 11 housekeeping genes in a reference set of 107 isolates of Neisseria meningitidis from invasive disease and healthy carriers. For each locus, alleles were assigned arbitrary numbers and dendrograms were constructed from the pairwise differences in multilocus allelic profiles by cluster analysis. The strain as

SUBMITTER: Maiden MC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC19708 | biostudies-literature | 1998 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature