FIGURE 1.

Evolution and whole-cell protein profiling of Escherichia coli during different manufacturing and ripening stages of raw milk cheeses. (A) Changes in E. coli concentration (dark shading) and in total coliform bacterial levels (light shading). The semihard goat, soft ewe, and semihard ewe cheese varieties are represented by red, yellow, and blue, respectively. The ripening stages are represented by the code shown in the legend. (B) Hierarchical classification of E. coli strains based on their SDS-PAGE protein profiles. Strains were clustered from a similarity matrix, and a representative SDS-PAGE profile from each cluster is shown. A reference E. coli strain (CECT4622) is included (white dot on dark row). The total number of strains in each cluster is shown in row headers. The number of isolates from each sample is shown in column headers.