Fig. 3

Phylogenetic tree showing the position of A. ovis, A. marginale, Anaplasma cf. platys and “Ca. Anaplasma africae” amplified from ruminates and A. platys amplified from dogs compared to other Anaplasmataceae species. Evolutionary analyses were conducted using MEGA7 [26]. The concatenated 23S rRNA, 16S rRNA and the rpoB genes of the Anaplasma spp. amplified in this study with other sequences of Anaplasmataceae species available from GenBank were aligned using CLUSTAL W implemented on BioEdit v.3 [25] (there were 1599 positions in the final dataset). The evolutionary history was inferred by using the maximum likelihood method based on theHasegawa–Kishino–Yano model. The percentage of trees in which the associated taxa clustered together is shown next to the branches. Initial tree for the heuristic search was obtained automatically by applying Neighbor-Join and BioNJ algorithms to a matrix of pairwise distances estimated using the maximum composite likelihood approach and then selecting the topology with superior log likelihood value. Statistical support for internal branches of the trees was evaluated by bootstrapping with 1000 iterations. A discrete gamma distribution was used to model evolutionary rate differences among sites [2 categories (+G, parameter = 0.3463)]. The analysis involved 41 nucleotide sequences. All positions containing gaps and missing data were excluded. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. The scale-bar represents a 20% nucleotide sequence divergence. Accession number for each concatenated sequence in the phylogenetic tree were provided for each species as [23S rRNA, rpoB and 16S rRNA]