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Three clinical strains of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli O157:H7 which were subcultured repeatedly or stored at room temperature over a 25-week period showed appreciable variations in their pulsed-field gel electrophoresis fragment patterns. The variations could be explained by a couple of spontaneous genetic events at most and thus did not invalidate the genetic lineage of the strains.
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Iguchi et al. (2002) studied this question.
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