Extended Data Fig. 4: BacA homologs are distributed among bacteria.

BacA phylogenic tree was generated by using the Maximum Likelihood method based on the JTT matrix-based model⁵². The tree with the highest log likelihood (−8349.22) 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 a JTT model, 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 17 amino acid sequences. All positions containing gaps and missing data were eliminated. There were a total of 274 positions in the final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA7⁵³. Protein sequences were obtained from a previous study⁵⁴.