Fig 4. Detection of methyl fatty acids in B. pertussis.

The amounts of methyl fatty acids were determined in BPSM (wt control), BPRM1 (deletion mutant), BPRM2 (chromosomal complementation), BPRM1(pBP2936) (plasmid complementation) and BPRM1(pBP2936^DA/YS) (complementation on plasmid with mutated BP2936). The relative abundance is defined as the ratio between the area of the C16 peak and the area of the internal standard peak, normalized to the number of cells. The experiments were performed on 3 to 5 independent samples for each strain. Means and standard errors of the means are shown. A Kruskal-Wallis test was used to analyze the data (*, p value < 0.05; ***, p value < 0.001).