Two STs (ST80 and ST88) were isolated over two or more years and from different cities, suggesting that these two STs had a wide geographical distribution. For the three outbreaks, outbreak A was caused by ST82 while outbreaks B and C were caused by ST80. However, the ST80 selleck compound isolates from outbreaks B and C can be separated by one band difference by

PFGE. Additionally, two Ruboxistaurin mw of the nine outbreak C isolates belonged to ST92. Therefore, outbreak C was caused by two STs and possibly due to contamination of the source (shrimp) by two different strains. There was also heterogeneity in isolates from the same city. The nine isolates from the 2010 active surveillance in Hangzhou were separated into six STs. Thus, our MLST analysis showed that these non-O1/non-O139 isolates were genetically diverse and some strains such as those belonging to ST80 can predominate across the regions. We compared the relationships of isolates based on MLST (Figure 2B) Selleckchem GW786034 with those based on PFGE. For the five STs (ST80, ST82, ST85, ST88 and ST92) with two or more isolates, each individual ST is associated with distinct PFGE nodes with all isolates of the same ST contained within the same node (Figure 2A). Additionally, two isolates of different STs, N10004 of ST83 and N10005 of ST80 were grouped together by PFGE with a three-band

difference and a 95% similarity (Figure 2A). This was consistent with the MLST relationship as ST83 was linked with ST80 with a two-allele difference (Figure 2B). The two alleles differed between ST83 and ST80 were gyrB and mdh with 5 bp and 4 bp differences, respectively. The differences in these genes may be due to recombination as V. cholerae Mirabegron undergoes recombination quite frequently [32]. Therefore, relationships of isolates with high similarity in PFGE patterns are consistent between PFGE and MLST. In contrast,

the relationships of isolates with less similar PFGE patterns were inconsistent with those based on MLST. For example, the ST86 isolate N10007 was grouped together with the ST81 isolate N11191 by PFGE, while by MLST ST81 and ST86 were not linked together on the MST (Figure 2B). These two isolates differed substantially in their banding patterns (Figure 2B) and also differed in all seven alleles by MLST. Similarly the grouping together of ST84 and ST94 by PFGE was also inconsistent with their relationship based on MLST (Figure 2B). As measured by the index of diversity (D), the discriminatory power of PFGE (D = 0.945) was clearly higher than MLST (D = 0.781) for characterisation of non-O1/non-O139 V. cholerae. PFGE further divided isolates within an ST for all STs except ST92 in which there were only two isolates and both were from the same outbreak. Antibiotic resistance patterns amongst non-O1/non-O139 V.