eBURST readme v3

Introduction

BURST was devised and developed by Ed Feil (University of Bath; [email protected]), while he was in the laboratory of Brian Spratt (now at Imperial College London; [email protected]), as a way of displaying the relationships between closely-related isolates of a bacterial species or population*. BURST, unlike cluster diagrams, trees or dendrograms, uses a simple but appropriate model of bacterial evolution in which an ancestral (or founding) genotype increases in frequency in the population, and while doing so, begins to diversify to produce a cluster of closely-related genotypes that are all descended from the founding genotype (Figure 1A). This cluster of related genotypes is often referred to as a “clonal complex”.

Full Text: DOWNLOAD PDF