We sought an explanation for epidemiological changes in Streptococcus agalactiae infections by investigating the link between ecological niches of the bacterium by determining the prevalence of 11 mobile genetic elements. The prevalence of nine of these elements differed significantly according to the human or bovine origin of the isolate. Correlating this distribution with the phylogeny obtain...

et al. Identification of melioidosis outbreak by multilocus variable number tandem repeat analysis. Emerg Infect Dis. 2009;15:169–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1502.081036 9. Tuanyok A, Auerbach RK, Brettin TS, Bruce DC, Munk AC, Detter JC, et al. A horizontal gene transfer event defines two distinct groups within Burkholderia pseudomallei that have dissimilar geographic distributions. J Bac...

Multilocus sequencing of housekeeping genes has been used previously for bacterial strain typing and for inferring evolutionary relationships among strains of Escherichia coli. In this study, we used shorter intergenic sequences that contained simple sequence repeats (SSRs) of repeating mononucleotide motifs (mononucleotide repeats [MNRs]) to infer the phylogeny of pathogenic and commensal E. c...

Members of the Fusarium solani species complex (FSSC) are increasingly implicated as the causative agents of human mycoses, particularly in the expanding immunocompromised and immunosuppressed patient populations. Best known as ubiquitous plant pathogens and saprotrophs, the FSSC comprises over 45 phylogenetically distinct species distributed among three major clades. To identify which species ...

In this study, we used genetic approaches to assess the conservation status of a protected amphibian species, Macedonian crested newt, Triturus macedonicus, in Northern Pindos National Park (Epirus, Greece). Mitochondrial DNA sequences and multilocus genotypes individuals from 38 breeding sites were infer their phylogenetic position detect measure variation patterns, population structure, level...

Scorpions represent an iconic lineage of arthropods, historically renowned for their unique bauplan, ancient fossil record and venom potency. Yet, higher level relationships of scorpions, based exclusively on morphology, remain virtually untested, and no multilocus molecular phylogeny has been deployed heretofore towards assessing the basal tree topology. We applied a phylogenomic assessment to...

Phylogenetic reconstructions of bacterial species from DNA sequences are hampered by the existence of horizontal gene transfer. One possible way to overcome the confounding influence of such movement of genes is to identify and remove sequences which are responsible for significant character incongruence when compared to a reference dataset free of horizontal transfer (e.g., multilocus enzyme e...