Fig. 3: Relationship of the novel P. malariae-related species M2 to other mammalian Plasmodium species, including M1 (represented by P. malariae) and its close relative M1-like, from African apes.
From: Zoonotic origin of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium malariae from African apes
A maximum-likelihood tree was derived from protein alignments. Nucleotide sequences for 186 genes with one-to-one orthologues in all 14 genomes were translated and aligned, then gene alignments were cleaned and concatenated to a single alignment from which the tree was constructed. The five major lineages are labelled; for the two corresponding to subgenera the names are italicised. The tree has been rooted on the branch to the Laverania36. The new, divergent ape-derived lineage M2 appears at the top of the tree in red. Bootstrap support from 1,000 replicates was at least 99% for all nodes except that separating the Malariae and Vivax lineages from the rest of the tree. The scale bar represents 0.05 substitutions/site.
