Fig. 2

eBURST analysis of 49 northern Italian Neospora caninum samples. Specimens from Lombardy (red dots) tend to cluster separately from those from Piedmont (green dots) or Veneto-Trento (blue dots). a Analysis using the Double Locus Variant (eBURST DLV) option shows that N. caninum multilocus genotypes can be separated into four groups (G1–4). Genotyping of an Italian isolate for which the province of origin was not known (violet dot) revealed results close to most isolates from Lombardy (group G4). b The full MST option in eBURST, including the complete data set (n = 50 N. caninum samples) shows the location of the individual groups within a network of all samples. The analysis was restricted to microsatellite markers available from this and a previous study [31]. Only samples that could be typed for all microsatellite markers were included. Moreover, MS10, which combines variation in three separate motifs (sub-loci), was analysed per each motif individually. Groups G1–G3 resemble the grouping reported in [31], while G4 represents a new group including 11 of 25 bovine N. caninum samples from Lombardy that were added to the analysis by this study