Abstract
A collection of 267 consecutively isolated Streptococcus anginosus strains was screened for the prevalence of previously described 'motile' strains by hybridization with oligonucleotide probes in a reverse line blot assay. The motile strains represented 101 (37.8%) of the S. anginosus strains. The vast majority of these strains fermented mannitol and raffinose, whereas most other S. anginosus strains did not (P<0.001). Most (83/101) of the motile strains were recovered from the urogenital tract (including five strains from neonatal surveillance cultures) and only a minority (36) of them were associated with infection-related samples (P97% sequence similarities), and that most sequence divergences between the ribogroups occurred in the 1024-1064 bp region of the 16S rRNA gene. The present data confirm the heterogeneity within the S. anginosus species.

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