Multilocus sequence typing of a dairy-associated Leuconostoc mesenteroides population reveals clonal structure with intragenic homologous recombination

Leuconostoc mesenteroides strains play an important role in food fermentation. In this study, 136 strains from different dairy products in China and Mongolia were examined by multilocus sequence typing of 9 housekeeping genes. In total, 82 polymorphic sites were detected among the 9 loci. The number of polymorphic nucleotide sites varied between 4 (dnaA) and 18 (uvrC), whereas the nucleotide diversity per site among the 9 genes varied from 0.00379 in dnaA to 0.01195 in uvrC, suggesting a relatively low level of sequence diversity. For the recombination measurement, incongruence in the trees based on a single gene and concatenated sequences of all sequencing types were observed, indicative of extensive intragenic homologous recombination. The overall relatedness built by minimum spanning trees showed no clear relationship between the clonal complexes and either isolation source or sampling location of the strains. Our study presents, for the first time, the population structure of Leuc. mesenteroides strains of dairy origin.