Figure 1

Multiple alignments of protein sequences of the SST identified cDNAs showing similar signal peptide. (A) The protein products of the original SST isolated S. japonicum egg cDNAs were aligned using ClustalW. The aligned sequences are limited to the candidates identified using SST, excluding database sequences. The N-terminal similar signal peptide is automatically colored red, indicating high similarity at the consensus sequence. Ostensibly, several other residues are also conserved and would be explored during the functional characterization. (B) The phylogenetic tree of the novel protein family identified using SST is shown here. The evolutionary history was inferred using the Minimum Evolution method. The evolutionary distances were computed using the p-distance method and are in the units of the number of amino acid differences per site. The analysis involved 6 amino acid sequences originally isolated using SST. Phylogenetic and evolutionary analyses were conducted on MEGA5 [76].