Table 1.
Time course of the case study.
P, positive to P. aeruginosa; N, negative to P. aeruginosa; C, culled; NL, not lactating goat.
Table 2.
Bacterial isolates characterized in this study.
Fig 1.
RAPD-PCR banding patterns obtained for the 33 P. aeruginosa isolates.
Lane 1, DNA Ladder; lanes 2–3, milk isolates (isolates 1 and 6, G1 genotype); lanes 4–5, environmental isolates (isolates 8 and 9, G2 genotype); lanes 6–7, environmental isolates (isolates 10 and 24, G3 genotype); lane 8, the human clinical strain P. aeruginosa PAO1 has been included as a reference. The photograph of the ethidium bromide-stained gel is displayed here as a reverse picture.
Fig 2.
Dendrogram of PFGE-banding patterns of the 33 P. aeruginosa isolates.
Clusters A and B comprise isolates from goat milk, whilist clusters C and D isolates from watering troughs.
Fig 3.
Hierarchical cluster analysis of phenotypic profiles.
Dendrogram showing phenotypic clusters (PC 1–5) of the tested P. aeruginosa isolates. The correlation threshold was automatically set at 22.34% by the software. The vertical axis reports every single isolate number and its PFGE cluster membership.
Table 3.
Pearson’s correlation matrix within different variables tested in the study.
Bold values are different from 0 at the significance level of alpha = 0.05.
Fig 4.
PCA plot showing correlation between phenotypic and PFGE clusters.
Phenotypic clusters (PC 1–5) are grouped within circles. PFGE clusters are represented by dots with different colors. Cluster A: red; cluster B: dark blue; cluster C: green; cluster D: light blue.
Fig 5.
Average virulence factors production by genetic clusters of P. aeruginosa.
Histograms reporting the levels of the indicated virulence-related phenotypes produced, on average, by the P. aeruginosa strains belonging to the milk isolate cluster (RAPD cluster G1 and PFGE clusters A plus B) and to the environmental clusters (RAPD clusters G2 and G3, corresponding to PFGE clusters B and C, respectively); (A) biofilm production; (B) elastase production; (C) gelatinase production; (D) hemolysins production; (E) protease production; (F) pyocyanin production; (G) swimming motility; (H) swarming motility (H). PAO1 was used as a control strain. The average of the independent experiments is reported with standard errors. Horizontal bars with asterisk indicate p < 0.05.
Table 4.
MIC of the 18 antimicrobial agents tested for the 33 Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates.