Most importantly, SliC and its lysozyme inhibition function conferred a fitness advantage to N. gonorrhoeae in vivo, which we demonstrated in preliminary competition experiments with the ΔsliC mutant against wild type during co-infection in the murine female genital tract (S3 Fig) and in biological triplicate studies (Fig 7B–7D), in which the ΔsliC/P::sliC* mutant strain, in addition to ΔsliC and the complemented strain, ΔsliC/P::sliC, were challenged against equal numbers of wild type bacteria. The gene discussed is LYZ; the disease is coinfection.