Figure 5.

Fitness of dotA and CB0206 Himar1 transposon mutants relative to NMII Coxiella burnetii. The relative fitness of dotA and CB0206 mutants was compared to wild-type NMII in mixed infections in 5 mice per group where NMII and mutant were inoculated into SCID mice IP in equal proportions. The competitive index (CI) for each infection was calculated by dividing the ratio of mutant-to-wild type genomes in the output sample by that in the inoculum. A CI of 1 indicates the mutant strain has no loss of fitness relative to wild-type bacteria. The data was analyzed using One-way ANOVA followed by the Dunnett's multiple comparisons test against NMII with Prism GraphPad software and significance is displayed using ^* for P < 0.05. Error bars represent standard deviations from the mean.