Sarmiento-Rubiano et al. BMC Genomics 2010, 11:504 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/11/504 Page 10 of 16 Figure 4 Dendrogram derived from the analysis of phenotypic properties (A) and SDS-PAGE whole-cell protein profiles (B) of Lactobacillus taiwanensis strains and related strains of species from the genus Lactobacillus. The analysis was performed using Pearson´s correlation coefficient (r) and the values are shown at the bottom of each dendrogram. Both trees (A and B) were constructed using the unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages (UPGMA). genes encoding proteins hypothetically involved in transport and metabolism of carbohydrates (cellobiose- specific PTS, trehalose-specific PTS system). Discussion A previous study designed to analyze the prebiotic effect of sorbitol in a rat model, resulted in the isolation of five Lactobacillus strains from the intestinal content that could not be assigned conclusively to known species [29]. Here, we have shown that the five isolates share almost identical 16S rRNA gene sequences, they form a tight cluster in the recA, pheS, pyrG and tuf phyloge- netic reconstructions and DNA-DNA hybridization experiments revealed close relatedness between them at