Figure 1. BURP analysis of the S. aureus spa types isolated from nasal swabs of 389 participants of the general population of Braunschweig, Germany.

Each spa type identified is depicted with circles. Related spa types are connected with a black line; resultant clonal complexes are written in bold. The predicted founder of each clonal complex is indicated in blue and sub-founders are labelled in yellow. The size of the circle is proportional to the frequency of the spa type in the population. Each clonal complex (CC) is defined by the predicted founder spa type or by the spa types it contains.