Fig. 5

To assess the value of these predictions to identify putative vaccine immunogens, predicted OMPs from each of the Borrelia genomes were organized into orthologous clusters, and the resulting information was presented as a heat map. In this analysis, clusters of Borrelia proteins predicted to be OMPs are represented as green blocks, while clusters of Borrelia proteins orthologous to these, but not passing all OMP prediction filters are represented in red. If a cluster of orthologous proteins was not encoded in a given borrelial genome, this was represented as a black block. These data were then subject to a two-way hierarchical clustering, by genome and by orthologous protein cluster. From this analysis, three groups of predicted OMPs were identified: Group a represents predicted borrelial OMPs unique to relapsing fever (RF) organisms, Group b represents predicted borrelial OMPs unique to Lyme disease (LD) pathogens and Group c includes predicted OMPs shared by both LD and RF pathogens. The candidate OMPs analyzed in this study are indicated with purple boxes corresponding to BB0405, BB0406, and BB0838. Asterisks (*) indicate known borrelial OMPs identified in the study including BamA, P66, BesC, and DipA. A larger version of this figure with cluster IDs and genome designations is provided in Additional file 4: Figure S1