Naturally occurring can have large deletions in housekeeping gene , making them untypable with multilocus sequence typing.

The gene is an essential housekeeping gene in all the species. It is one of the seven genes used for multilocus sequence typing (MLST) this genus. It encodes the cytosolic component of an ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter complex of unknown function. We report here the finding of a strain of with a 485 base pair deletion in the 5' region of the gene that truncates the protein product from 636 amino acids to 89 amino acids. A second open reading frame (ORF), encoding the latter 388 amino acids of the gene, was predicted downstream. The deletion will affect MLST profiling; interrogation of genomic sequences from PubMLST revealed that this isolate is not an anomaly. Deletions in were identified in 256 genomes, roughly 0.6% of isolates. Furthermore, these deletions could leave the gene in a pseudogenized state. Our strain, isolated from a patient with symptoms of gonorrheal infection, nevertheless behaved normal in terms of growth and phenotypic properties.