Fig. 1

The Sp185/333 genes have two exons and a mosaic of elements in the second exon. a An alignment cartoon illustrates the structure of several genes with two exons (shown in relative size scale) and one intron (int; not shown to scale). Elements in the second exon are indicated as colored rectangles and gaps that have been artificially inserted to optimize the alignment are shown as horizontal black lines. All known elements are numbered at the top. Element patterns share mosaics of elements and naming of element patterns (on the left) are based on the sequence of element 10 (equivalent of element 15 in [25]). The imperfect, tandem type I repeats in the 5′ half of the second exon are indicated as red rectangles (elements 2–5) and have been evaluated computationally for duplications, deletions and recombinations [31]. Five additional types of repeats are imperfect and interspersed in elements 11–26 (see [20]). This figure is modified from the repeat-based alignment published in [20]. b The approximate locations of primers are indicated with arrows within the standard Sp185/333 gene structure. These primers are used to amplify Sp185/333 gene sequences and to identify the genes within the BAC insert assemblies. Primer sequences are listed in Additional file 1: Table S1. The arrows between (a) and (b) indicate the correlation between elements in (a) and locations of primers shown in (b)