Fig. 2

Phylogenetic tree showing the relationship of E. meliloti strain FSM-MA. The evolutionary history was inferred by using the Maximum Likelihood method based on the General Time Reversible model [30]. The tree with the highest log likelihood (−2208.71) is shown. 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 superior log likelihood value. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA7 [31]