Fig. 3

Minimum spanning net for distances on basis of a Kimura two-parameter (K2P) model corrected distance matrix from sequence alignment, showing the relations between the different A. phagocytophilum 16S rRNA variants determined from this study. The corresponding hosts and an exemplary sequence for each variant are given in Additional file 2: Table S5. Variants highlighted in pink include cattle as host, and those highlighted in blue include dogs as host. Circles with multiple names represent variants separated only by 1 ambiguous nucleotide. Labelling is explained in “Data compilation and naming of sequences” section