Fig. 5

Refined genealogy of BCG vaccine strains. The year when the strain was obtained per geographical location is indicated where possible (indigo). The scheme shows regions of difference (RD), insertions (Ins), deletions (‘∆’), indels and tandem duplications (DU), which differentiate the different BCG strains (Additional file 2: Table S8). The blue dashed squares indicate the different DU2-forms, which classify the BCG strains into four major lineages. When the DU1 is not found in all substrains of a certain strain, this is indicated on the scheme. According to the literature, two different substrains of BCG are named BCG China or Beijing [8]. Therefore, the scheme contains two ‘BCG China’ strains: BCG China [8] and BCG China* [7, 14]. Adapted from references [8, 11, 14, 28, 29]. Concerning reference [8], only the RD and deleted genes that could be verified on the assembled genomes [12] are included