Fig 2. Bioinformatic analysis of MlaA conservation and genome context.

(A) A phylogenetic tree of MlaA was constructed in MEGA using amino acid sequences of MlaA/VacJ homologs downloaded from NCBI. The Jones-Taylor-Thornton model was used to generate a pairwise distance matrix. Neighbor-Join and BioNJ algorithms were subsequently applied to the matrix to obtain the initial tree for a heuristic search. 500 bootstrap iterations were performed to test the phylogenies. The highest log-likelihood tree is presented. Homologs without lipoprotein signal peptides are represented by red branches; blue branches represent homologs with lipoprotein signal peptides. (B) The PubMLST Neisseria database was used to search for nucleotide polymorphic sites in the mlaA (NEIS1933) locus across 44,289 Neisseria isolates. (C) Local genome context of N. gonorrhoeae mlaA. Intergenic distances between open reading frames are noted above the schematic. The operon predicted by biocyc.org is noted below. Schematic and intergenic distances are not to scale.