FIG 7.

16S rRNA gene-based phylogenetic tree of methanotrophic and other Verrucomicrobia showing that the methanotrophic mesophilic strains cluster separately from the methanotrophic thermophilic species. The evolutionary history was inferred using the neighbor-joining method. The optimal tree with the branch length sum of 4.46361805 is shown. The percentage of replicate trees (values above 40%) in which the associated taxa clustered in the bootstrap test (10,000 replicates) is shown next to the branches. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths shown in the same units as those of the evolutionary distances used to infer the phylogenetic tree. The evolutionary distances were computed using the Jukes-Cantor method and are in the units of the number of base substitutions per site. The analysis involved 128 nucleotide sequences. All ambiguous positions were removed for each sequence pair. There were a total of 1,647 positions in the final data set. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA5.