“…MLST was originally employed to identify hypervirulent lineages of Neisseria meningitides (171). However, the approach has now been applied to a variety of other pathogens, including S. aureus (72,79,83,92,117,206) and enterococci (259,284), for the assignment of S. pneumoniae strains to major hypervirulent, penicillin-resistant, and multiple-antibioticresistant clones (84,232), and to a large number of other organisms (73,85,160,212,217,221). In evaluating MLST it is important to remember that, like multilocus enzyme electrophoresis, the method was originally designed to assess genetic interrelationships in bacterial populations with sufficient opportunity for the sequence of housekeeping genes to diversify, such as in evolutionary studies.…”