Current View on Phytoplasma Genomes and Encoded Metabolism

Figure 1

Phylogenetic tree constructed by parsimony analyses of 16S rDNA sequences of 34 phytoplasma strains, belonging to all ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma’ species described employing A. laidlawii as outgroup. The completely sequenced strains are in bold. CLUSTAL W from the Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis program-MEGA5 [26] was used for multiple alignment. The maximum parsimony tree was obtained using the Close-Neighbour-Interchange algorithm, implemented in the MEGA5, with search level 3 in which the initial trees were obtained with the random addition of sequences (10 replicates). One of nine equally parsimonious trees is shown in Figure 1. Numbers on the branches are bootstrap values obtained for 2000 replicates (only values above 60% are shown). GenBank accession numbers are given in parentheses, and 16Sr group classification (when available) is shown on the right side of the tree. Asterisk indicates ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma’ proposed by the IRPCM Phytoplasma/Spiroplasma Working Team—phytoplasma taxonomy group [5], not yet formally described. The tree is drawn to scale with branch lengths calculated using the average pathway method and represents the number of changes over the whole sequence. The scale bar represents 20 nucleotide substitutions.