Fig. 2

Phylogenetic tree highlighting the position of Methanosprillulm hungatei strain JF1 relative to other type strains within the Methanomicrobiales. The evolutionary history was inferred by using the Maximum Likelihood method based on the Tamura-Nei model [43]. The tree with the highest log likelihood (−3033.8513) is shown. 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 superior log likelihood value. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. The analysis involved 12 nucleotide sequences. Codon positions included were 1st + 2nd + 3rd + Noncoding. All positions containing gaps and missing data were eliminated. There were a total of 789 positions in the final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA6 [44]