FIG 4.

Strain differences are present and abundant among the top three species cultured from meconium. DNA was extracted from overnight cultures of the three most prevalent species isolated from meconium and subjected to restriction digest prior to pulsed-field gel electrophoresis. Dendrograms of banding profiles were constructed using UPGMA based on Dice similarity coefficients. (A and B) The similarity between digest patterns of Escherichia coli (A) and Staphylococcus epidermidis (B) was generally low, indicating nonrelated strains. (C) Isolates of Enterococcus faecalis showed four evident clusters of indistinguishable banding patterns, suggesting the presence of multiple identical strains (colored bars).