IREB2 and bacterial urinary tract infection: On the other hand, in the group of isolates obtained from UTI, a strong association was observed for the usp, irp2 genes (φ = 0.7), a moderate association for the papC, irp2 (φ = 0.34) and the vat, pic genes (φ = 0.46), while the genes encoding the adhesins papC and fimH were weakly associated with the iss gene (respectively φ = 0.28, φ = 0.21).