BCC has also been shown to colonise natural habitats including agricultural soils, plant rhizospheres, and river waters [4–7]. The maize rhizosphere is a favourable niche for BCC bacteria, probably due to their ability to metabolise at high rates maize root exudates [8] and has

also been suggested to represent a natural reservoir of bacterial strains that may PRI-724 molecular weight exhibit pathogenic traits [9–13]. A close association between maize roots and BCC has been observed in a number of different locations worldwide [6, 14–17]. Studies on BCC populations recovered from Italian maize rhizosphere have shown the presence of several BCC species such as B. cepacia, B. cenocepacia (recA lineage IIIB), B. ambifaria, B. pyrrocinia, and BCC groups such as BCC5 and

BCC6 suggesting MRT67307 research buy possible novel plant associated species within the complex [14, 18–20]. In Mexico, where maize has traditionally been cultivated for thousands of years, B. cenocepacia (recA lineage IIIB) and B. vietnamiensis were isolated with other Burkholderia species from the rhizosphere of local and commercial varieties of maize plants cultivated in distant geographical regions [[21, 22], our unpublished data]. The maize rhizosphere is a dynamic and active environment in which many factors may affect the diversity and activity of microbial communities [23, 24]. The distribution of identical clones among BCC populations recovered from geographically disparate Italian maize rhizospheres suggested that bacterial flow may occur among BCC populations of different geographic areas [20]. Therefore, assessing the diversity of maize-rhizosphere associated BCC species in different and distant SB-715992 mw countries may provide critical insight into the population structure, evolution and ecology of such BCC populations. Indexing allelic variation in sets of housekeeping genes provides a good basis for estimating overall levels of genotypic

variation in microbial populations [25, 26]. Methods based on this principle, such as multilocus restriction typing (MLRT), multilocus enzyme electrophoresis (MLEE), and multilocus sequence typing (MLST), provide good insights into the genetic relationships among strains [27–30]. During the last decade, MLST has emerged as a powerful tool Fludarabine cell line in studies of BCC epidemiology and population structure [31]. MLRT has a lower discrimination power than MLST, but acceptable turnaround time and lower cost make it really advantageous, especially for an ‘in-house’ initial genotype screening of isolates collected in large-scale [32–34]. Furthermore, MLRT has been used to study the global epidemiology and the population structure of B. cenocepacia [26, 32], Streptococcus pneumoniae [28] and Helicobacter pylori [35], as well as to determine the genetic relationships among strains of Neisseria meningitidis [25, 36], Staphylococcus aureus [37], Escherichia coli [38] and Yersinia enterocolitica biovar 1A [30].