MLSA employs
the information of several genes for identification of species,
while MLST is a powerful tool for analysis of population
structure and molecular epidemiological studies. Both
methods produce highly reproducible unambiguous data, but
MLST offers the possibility to exchange information between
different laboratories worldwide through a shared database
(http://www.mlst.net/) (Griffiths et al. 2010; Jolley et al.
2004). Nevertheless, MLSA and MLST are expensive and
time-consuming methodologies to be widely employed in environmental
and clinical laboratories for screening of large
collections of isolates. Therefore, practical schemes based on
single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) represent simple alternatives
to gene-targeted methodologies