eBURST: Inferring Patterns of Evolutionary Descent among Clusters of Related Bacterial Genotypes from Multilocus Sequence Typing Data

The introduction of multilocus sequence typing (MLST) for the precise characterization of isolates of bacterial pathogens has had a marked impact on both routine epidemiological surveillance and microbial population biology. In both fields, a key prerequisite for exploiting this resource is the ability to discern the relatedness and patterns of evolutionary descent among isolates with similar genotypes. Traditional clustering techniques, such as dendrograms, provide a very poor representation of recent evolutionary events, as they attempt to reconstruct relationships in the absence of a realistic model of the way in which bacterial clones emerge and diversify to form clonal complexes. An increasingly popular…

• WT
  Wellcome Trust
• IC
  Imperial College London
• UO
  University of Oxford
• MR
  Medical Research Council