Aanensen David M, Spratt Brian G
Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London, St Mary's Hospital, London W2 1PG, UK.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2005 Jul 1;33(Web Server issue):W728-33. doi: 10.1093/nar/gki415.
The unambiguous characterization of strains of a pathogen is crucial for addressing questions relating to its epidemiology, population and evolutionary biology. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST), which defines strains from the sequences at seven house-keeping loci, has become the method of choice for molecular typing of many bacterial and fungal pathogens (and non-pathogens), and MLST schemes and strain databases are available for a growing number of prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Sequence data are ideal for strain characterization as they are unambiguous, meaning strains can readily be compared between laboratories via the Internet. Laboratories undertaking MLST can quickly progress from sequencing the seven gene fragments to characterizing their strains and relating them to those submitted by others and to the population as a whole. We provide the gateway to a number of MLST schemes, each of which contain a set of tools for the initial characterization of strains, and methods for relating query strains to other strains of the species, including clustering based on differences in allelic profiles, phylogenetic trees based on concatenated sequences, and a recently developed method (eBURST) for identifying clonal complexes within a species and displaying the overall structure of the population. This network of MLST websites is available at http://www.mlst.net.
对病原体菌株进行明确的特征描述对于解决与其流行病学、种群生物学和进化生物学相关的问题至关重要。多位点序列分型（MLST）通过七个管家基因座的序列来定义菌株，已成为许多细菌和真菌病原体（以及非病原体）分子分型的首选方法，并且针对越来越多的原核生物和真核生物，已有MLST方案和菌株数据库。序列数据是菌株特征描述的理想选择，因为它们明确无误，这意味着不同实验室可以通过互联网轻松地对菌株进行比较。开展MLST的实验室可以迅速从对七个基因片段进行测序发展到对其菌株进行特征描述，并将它们与其他实验室提交的菌株以及整个种群的菌株进行关联。我们提供了通往多个MLST方案的入口，每个方案都包含一组用于菌株初步特征描述的工具，以及将查询菌株与该物种的其他菌株进行关联的方法，包括基于等位基因谱差异的聚类、基于串联序列的系统发育树，以及一种最近开发的用于识别物种内克隆复合体并展示种群整体结构的方法（eBURST）。这个MLST网站网络可在http://www.mlst.net获取。
