Fig. 3

Phylogenetic tree of the ompA gene of Rickettsia species using the maximum likelihood method and the general time reversible model [51]; log likelihood -1213.84. Sequences obtained in this study are marked with an asterisk (*). The percentage of trees in which the associated taxa clustered together is shown next to the branches. Initial tree(s) for the heuristic search were obtained automatically by applying Neighbor-Join and BioNJ algorithms to a matrix of pairwise distances estimated using the maximum composite likelihood (MCL) approach, and then selecting the topology with the superior log likelihood value. A discrete gamma distribution was used to model evolutionary rate differences among sites [two categories (+ G, parameter = 0.3509)]. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. Codon positions included were 1st + 2nd + 3rd + noncoding. There was a total of 502 positions in the final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA X [42]