Figure 2

Histogram representation of the rates of identical nt positions amongst the SSR sequences of 15 Leishmania species. Each vertical bar represents a 20 nt window. At each end, 109 and 97 bp cover the 5' ends of PAXP and XPP genes, respectively (black bars). Two segments of the SSR appear highly conserved (B and D, hatched bars) as compared with other segments (A and C, open bars). It is noteworthy that the comparison of 100 bps from a Leishmania gene generally yields divergence rates similar to those obtained when one compares the whole length of the gene : e.g. here, for PAXP, the identity rates between the sequences from L. major and L. braziliensis are 83.5% for the whole gene (now available in GeneDB) and 85.7% for the 109 bps analysed here. XPP, PAXP, IS as in Fig. 1.