Epidemic population structure of extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli determined by single nucleotide polymorphism pyrosequencing

► We have developed an MLST-based pyrosequencing scheme for typing Escherichia coli using SNPs. ► We have tested the method in two collections of clinical isolates of E. coli. ► The four major profiles accounted for 44% of the isolates. ► The method is easy to implement and might be useful for typing large microbial collections.