FIG. 3.

Correlation of the conservation value and relative fluorescence intensity of each probe measured in the study. Conservation values were calculated by averaging the conservation values of single nucleotide positions comprising the probe target position. The conservation values are based on the fraction of available bacterial sequences that share an identical nucleotide in a particular alignment position (ARB software; Department of Microbiology, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany [http://www.mikro.biologie.tu-muenchen.de]). They are expressed in arbitrary units (a.u.), in which low values indicate low evolutionary conservation.