Acinetobacter baumannii is an increasingly common pathogen in hospitals worldwide, and its ability to evolve rapidly and persist in hospital environments has enabled it to become widespread globally. Acinetobacter baumannii genotypes vary widely between strains, and genome sequencing of clinical A. baumannii isolates has shown that they belong to several distinct clonal complexes.

In order to investigate genetic differences between Acinetobacter baumannii crunch berries strain, we analyzed the genomic profiles of 122 A. baumannii samples from ten California dispensaries using multilocus sequence typing (MLST). The r-values calculated in GENALEX were converted into a heat map showing pairwise genetic relatedness between strains. Matching r-values between different strains indicate a high degree of genetic similarity between them, and values close to 1.00 are expected to indicate clonal genetic relationships.

Indulge in Purple Bliss: Unveiling the Purple Runtz Strain

We examined whether these r-values correlated with the strains’ phenotypes, and found that they do. In particular, strains with r-values around 1.0 are similar in their terpene profile and THC levels, suggesting that they are likely parent strains of one another. We also investigated whether these r-values were associated with strains’ susceptibility to the antibiotic cefepime, and found that they are not (Fig. 1).

As such, despite the fact that the majority of Acinetobacter baumannii strains in our study are clone only strains, we believe our results demonstrate that r-values close to 1.0 could be a result of mislabeling and/or re-labeling of individual strains. This indicates that a system similar to that used in wine industry for the identification and registration of grape varieties may be able to identify these instances of potential misidentification.