Summary L isteria monocytogenes is ubiquitously prevalent in natural environments and is transmitted via the food chain to animals and humans, in whom it can cause life‐threatening diseases. We used M ultilocus S equence T yping ( MLST ) of ∼2000 isolates of L . monocytogenes to investigate whether specific associations existed between clonal complexes ( CCs ) and the environment versus diseased hosts. Most CCs (72%) were not...

Summary Multilocus sequence analysis of 417 strains of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis revealed that it is a complex of four populations, three of which have been previously assigned species status [ Y. pseudotuberculosis sensu stricto (s.s.), Yersinia pestis and Yersinia similis ] and a fourth population, which we refer to as the Korean group, which may be in the process of speciation. We detected clear signs of recombination wit...

Summary The recent evolution of bacterial species can be elucidated with the aid of large historical strain collections. Unfortunately, information for some of these strain collections is not publicly available, or only in a format which is not readily digitized. The form of storage of traditional collection often requires considerable space and microbiological access to the individual strains can be time consuming. One such h...

Mitochondrial DNA and microsatellite sequences are powerful genetic markers for inferring the genealogy and the population genetic structure of animals but they have only limited resolution for organisms that display low genetic variability due to recent strong bottlenecks. An alternative source of data for deciphering migrations and origins in genetically uniform hosts can be provided by some of their microbes, if their evolu...