Fig 1.
Phylogenetic position of the strains from the VSL#3 product.
This phylogenetic tree was generated based on the genome-predicted core proteome shared between the strains from the VSL#3 product and that of a set of relevant reference and representative strains. The position of the eight strains used for the formulation of the VSL#3 product are shaded in blue.
Table 1.
General predicted genomic features of bacterial strains from VSL#3 product.
Fig 2.
Defense systems of the multi-species probiotic product VSL#3.
Number of predicted restriction/modification enzymes (blue) and CRISPR-Cas spacers (green). Strains devoid of CRISPR-Cas loci have a number of spacers equal to zero.
Fig 3.
CRISPR-Cas loci identified in the strains of the VSL#3 product.
The CRISPR-Cas loci were identified using CRISPRFinder [56] and their gene order and predicted annotations are depicted along with their juxtaposing array of spacers. Legend: *, split gene.
Table 2.
Evaluation of minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) of antibiotics against VSL#3 strains.
The values in bold represent those MICs showing higher values compared to EFSA cut-off (in parenthesis) [40]. n.d. not determined as not required by EFSA since these species show a high level of natural resistance [40].
Fig 4.
Pilus gene clusters identified in the multispecies product VSL#3.
Both Tad pilus and sortase-dependent pilus gene clusters are shown along with a corresponding pilus gene cluster previously characterized [17]. The percentage indicates the degree of amino acid sequence conservation between the different genes.