FIG. 3.

ClpE proteins from L. lactis and B. subtilis form a separate branch in the Clp phylogeny. A phylogenetic tree was constructed by the neighbor-joining method (30) as described in Materials and Methods on the basis of an analysis of the ATP-1 domains of 22 Clp or Hsp100 proteins. The horizontal branch lengths are proportional to the genetic distance. The asterisk indicates that the B. napus ClpA protein belongs to the ClpC family when the taxonomy described by Schirmer et al. (31) is applied.