Figure 1.

Staphylococcus epidermidis dendrogram of relatedness of 50 true positive isolates (red), 25 likely contaminant isolates (yellow) and 25 isolates from the skin of healthy volunteers (green) using multilocus sequence typing. At left, associated pair charts show distribution of isolate source in various arms. At right, numerical values represent the sequence type derived from sequencing of 7 genes of S. epidermidis. While in general the horizontal distance between strains depicts their genetic dissimilarity, dashed lines reflect sequence types that have been horizontally shifted to the right to preserve readability of the figure. MLST revealed significant variability in sequence type in this prospectively gathered sample and large overlap in sequence type among strains of different provenance.