Isolate identification Isolates were identified by means of HaeIII recA restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) and species-specific PCRs as previously reported [55]. RFLP profiles were compared with those of published reference strains as appropriate. All Italian isolates have been identified at the species level in previous works [19, 20, 22, 52, 53]. Fourteen Mexican isolates characterized by recA RFLP profile J’
were identified as B. cenocepacia IIIB, while 12 Mexican isolates showing the recA RFLP Rabusertib profile AD were assigned to BCC6 group (present study). Two Mexican isolates with the RFLP profile I (which gave uncertain identification) and two Mexican isolates with RFLP profiles which were never recovered among BCC reference strains examined were assigned to B. cenocepacia IIIB by MLST analysis (Table 1) [22]. MLRT characterization and data analysis DNA preparation, PCR amplification of nearly complete sequence of five open reading frames of recA, gyrB, fliC, cepIR and dsbA genes, enzymatic restriction digests and separation of the resulting restriction fragments were performed as described previously [26]. Gel
BAY 11-7082 in vitro images were digitalized using GelDoc 2000 (Bio-Rad) and stored as TIFF files. Different Liver X Receptor agonist restriction patterns for each locus were considered to represent separate alleles, and an arbitrary number was assigned to each allele. The different combinations of alleles for the five loci represented different allelic profiles. An arbitrary number N-acetylglucosamine-1-phosphate transferase [restriction type (RT)] was assigned to each allelic profile. The different restriction patterns found at each locus were analysed with DNA START-2 (Sequence Type Analysis and Recombination Test, version 2) software package http://pubmlst.org/software/analysis/start2/[56]. RT data sets were also analyzed using the eBURST (Based Upon Related Sequence Types) algorithm v3 http://eburst.mlst.net/. MLRT profiles were also analyzed by means of BioNumerics (Applied Maths) software 6.0. Cluster analysis was carried out on data
defined as character type data. A similarity matrix was created by using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic means algorithm (UPGMA) in order to assess the genetic relationships between the restriction profiles. The cophenetic correlation coefficient was used as a statistical method to estimate the error associated with dendrogram branches, while the Cluster Cutoff method was applied to define the most reliable clusters. Linkage disequilibrium analysis The genetic diversity at individual loci (h), the mean genetic diversity (H mean ) and the standardized index of association ( ) were calculated using the LIAN version 3.5 software program (Department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics University of Applied Sciences Weihenstephan; http://adenine.biz.fh-weihenstephan.de/cgi-bin/lian/lian.cgi.pl) [57].