FIG 3.

Conservation of duplication within the BP3410 exporter in other organisms. The amino acid sequences of the BP3410 exporter of B. pertussis and its selected homologues found in different organisms were aligned with the MUSCLE algorithm built in the MEGA software using the neighbor-joining clustering method. The black asterisk indicates a highly conserved negatively charged residue essential for cation transport. Aligned residues that can be considered similar based on their physicochemical distance at a given position are shown in red. Similar residues found in at least 70 % of the aligned sequences are enclosed in blue frames. The triangles mark the duplicated amino acid sequence present only in B. pertussis and three recent isolates of A. veronii (red triangles) and the sequence present in all homologous proteins (blue triangles). The amino acid residues are numbered according to the B. pertussis BP3410 protein. The complete alignment is presented in Fig. S1.