Selection of characters for an Adansonian analysis of mycobacterial taxonomy.

Tests which are most frequently employed to provide characters for numerical analysis of bacterial taxonomy provide little differentiation among the slow-growing members of the genus Mycobacterium. A special scheme was proposed to deal with this problem. Characters were based, to some extent, on quantitative reactions to tests, and were defined, for each test, in terms of natural clustering behavior of a large collection of assorted strains. Inter- and intrataxon analyses were based on comparisons of reaction patterns with tentative hypothetical median strain patterns. This permitted the analysis of larger numbers of cultures than can be practically studied in a conventional n x n table.