FIG. 2.

Phylogenetic tree based on the deduced amino acid sequences of the proteins encoded by the hrpA genes of strains MC58, Z2491, FAM18, and alpha 14. In addition, the protein sequences encoded by six putative hrpA genes present in the preliminary sequence of Neisseria lactamica ST640 were included in the analysis. The meningococcal HrpA proteins clearly cluster into two separate groups. The HrpA protein identified in strain alpha 14 (denoted by NM0_0398 in the figure) is closely related to the group of HrpA proteins encoded by genes homologous to NMB1779. In contrast, the six HrpA proteins identified in N. lactamica (denoted by NLA8870, NLA12910, NLA10070, NLA8290, NLA8610, and NLA8550 in the figure) are closely related to the second group of meningococcal HrpA proteins encoded by NMB0493, NMB1214, and NMB1768. BP1879 denotes the ORF encoding the filamentous hemagglutinin of B. pertussis. Alignments were performed with ClustalW. Tree construction was performed with MEGA (version 3.1) using the neighbor-joining method. Regions of the alignment containing gaps were excluded from the analysis. The scale bar indicates linkage distance.