The similarities of PCR–DGGE profiles were analyzedwith BioNumerics software version 3.0 (Applied Maths, Sint- Martens-Latem, Belgium) using the Dice function. DNA bands were manually assigned in the software and compared
using a positional tolerance of 0.5% with manual correction where required. A distance matrix was calculated by the Dice
and dendrograms were constructed from this matrix using the