FIG. 3.

Neighbor-joining tree of selected S. aureus genotypes and closely related coagulase-negative staphylococcal species, based on the concatenated sequences of six MLST genes. arcC is excluded due to difficulties in amplifying this gene in S. simiae. This analysis confirms that ST1223 is more closely related to other S. aureus genotypes than to the nearest coagulase-negative species and clusters with S. aureus with a bootstrap support of 100%. This is consistent with the taxonomic status of ST1223 as S. aureus.