Characterization of the Kingella kingae mdh gene.

A MAFFT alignment of the Kkimdh nucleotide sequences and its flanking regions from the 45 studied K. kingae strains was performed using Geneious R11.0.5 (32, 33). The related distance matrix of the 45 distinct Kkimdh genes was obtained using Geneious R11.0.5 (Table S4). To detect possible lateral gene transfer from or within the genome of other bacterial species, a MegaBlastN search with default parameters (http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) was then conducted by comparing the obtained mdh orthologous sequences and their genomic environment to public databases. A neighbor-joining tree of Kkimdh gene sequences was then created using MEGA7, with default parameters (34).