Figure 4
Genotyping of hypervariable virulence genes revealed no preferential colonization of specific genotypes of SA strains in persistent and intermittent carriers. (A) eBURP clustering analysis based on spa types revealed that both persistent and intermittent carrier strains belonged to same clonal complexes. spa types colored in blue contain only persistent carriers while those in black contain only intermittent carriers. spa types colored in green contain both intermittent and persistent carriers. Circle sizes in each cluster are proportional to the number of isolates and inferred founders (blue circles) and sub-founders (yellow circles) of each cluster are also represented here. spa types with less than 5 repeats were excluded from the eBURP analysis. (B) A representative set of SA persistent (colored in blue) and intermittent (colored in black) carrier strains having indistinguishable clfB R domain repeat region sequences. Like-colored boxes indicate 100% sequence similarity between SA strains.