Fig. 1

Phylogenetic tree highlighting the position of L. hongkongensis relative to the type strains of the other species within the genus Loktanella [6, 13]. The tree was inferred from 1353 aligned characters of the 16S rRNA gene sequence under the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion as previously described [14]. Rooting was done initially using the midpoint method and then checked for its agreement with the current classification (Table 1). The branches are scaled in terms of the expected number of substitutions per site. Numbers adjacent to the branches are support values from 350 ML bootstrap replicates (left) and from 1000 maximum-parsimony bootstrap replicates (right) if larger than 60 % [6]. Lineages with type strain genome sequencing projects registered in GOLD [7] are labeled with one asterisk, those also listed as ‘Complete and Published’ with two asterisks