Characterization of clonal relatedness among the natural population of Staphylococcus aureus strains by using spa sequence typing and the BURP (based upon repeat patterns) algorithm

We evaluated the BURP (based upon repeat patterns) algorithm, which relies on sequencing of the Staphylococcus aureus protein A gene (spa), for its ability to infer clonal relatedness within a population of 110 wild-type strains. BURP clustering of the resulting 66 spa types was highly concordant with multilocus sequence typing (96.5% concordance) and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (94.9%).