The BURST algorithm first identifies mutually exclusive groups of related genotypes in the population (typically a multilocus sequence typing [MLST] database), and attempts to identify the founding genotype (sequence type or ST) of each group. The algorithm then predicts the descent from the predicted founding genotype to the other genotypes in the group, displaying the output as a radial diagram, centred on the predicted founding genotype. The procedure was developed for use with the data produced by MLST (STs and their allelic profiles) but can be used with some other molecular typing methods that define isolates as strings of integers