, 1991). All 102 strains used in this study are available at CAHFS and received an internal strain ID as listed in Table 1. The complete list of the S. Enteritidis strains, source, geographical diversity of isolates and other details are included in Table 1. Salmonella Enteritidis genomic DNA was extracted using the GenElute Bacterial Genomic DNA Kit (Sigma, St Louis, MO) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Primers used for PCR amplification of caiC and SEN0629 locus Everolimus research buy fragments are listed in Table 2. PCR was carried out in a PTC 100 Peltier Thermal Cycler (GMI, Ramsey, MN). PCR amplification was performed using the ReadyMix Taq PCR Reaction

Mix (Sigma) following the manufacturer’s instructions. PCR was carried out in a final volume of 50 μL using 25 μL of the ReadyMix, 0.3 μM of each primer, 1 μL of DNA extract and sterile water to make up the final volume. The PCR thermal cycling conditions included an initial denaturation at 94 °C for 5 min, 35 cycles

of denaturation at 95 °C GSK1120212 cell line for 30 s, annealing at 55 °C for 40 s, extension at 68 °C for 60 s and final extension at 68 °C for 5 min. PCR products were purified using a QIAquick PCR purification kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany), according to the manufacturer’s instructions, and analysed by 1.5% agarose gel electrophoresis. Purified PCR products were sent to the University of California DNA sequencing facility at the University of California (Davis, CA) along with PCR primers for direct sequencing. Sequencing was performed in both directions to ensure accuracy. Sequences obtained in this study and those retrieved from GenBank were aligned using clustalw integrated in the freely available arb software package (Ludwig et al., 2004). Alignments were trimmed to a uniform length (corresponding to nucleotide positions 82788–83514 for caiC and 696231–697280 for SEN0629 on the genome sequence of S. Enteritidis str. 125109, accession no. AM933172). The trimmed alignments were used to construct a concatenated alignment. Phylogenetic trees based on the neighbour-joining method (Saitou & Nei, 1987) were constructed from the individual alignments as well as from the concatenated

alignment using mega version 4.0 Thymidine kinase package (Tamura et al., 2007). Evolutionary distances were calculated by Kimura’s two-parameter model of substitution (Kimura, 1980). Bootstrap confidence values were generated using 1000 repeats of bootstrap samplings (Felsenstein, 1985). The nucleotide sequences determined in this study have been deposited in GenBank under accession numbers JN546231–JN546434. Full alignments of all 16 sequence types displaying all bases as well as differences to sequence type 1 were deposited as a popset in GenBank. caiC encodes a probable crotonobetaine/carnitine–CoA ligase and the fragment analysed ranged from position 82788 to 83514 on the genome sequence of S. Enteritidis str. P125109, accession no. AM933172.