Figure 3

The evolutionary relationship of the strain M18SP4Q (ii) with the 16S rRNA gene sequences of its closely related strains is shown in the neighbour joining phylogenetic tree. The evolutionary history was inferred using the Neighbor-Joining method [17]. The optimal tree with the sum of branch length = 0.33445952 is shown. The percentage of replicate trees in which the associated taxa clustered together in the bootstrap test (1000 replicates) is shown above the branches [18]. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths in the same units as those of the evolutionary distances used to infer the phylogenetic tree. The evolutionary distances were computed using the p-distance method [19] and are in the units of the number of base differences per site. The analysis involved 28 nucleotide sequences. All ambiguous positions were removed for each sequence pair. There were a total of 1539 positions in the final dataset.