Fig. 1

Conservation and change in E2F/DP function and expression across Dictyostelia. Proteins containing E2F/DP winged helix DNA binding domains were identified by their Interpro identifier IPR003316 and BlastP search of five taxon-group representative dictyostelid proteomes. The sequences corresponding to the E2F/DP domains were aligned and a phylogeny was inferred by Bayesian analysis [16], and decorated with the functional domain architecture of the proteins analysed using SMART [17]. Locus tags and gene names are colour coded to reflect the taxon group of the host species, as shown in the dictyostelid phylogeny. Clades of orthologous genes or other groupings are annotated with relative transcript levels, shown as heat maps, at different developmental stages (yellow-red: 0–1 fraction of maximum value), prespore or prestalk cells (white-green: 0–1 fraction of summed reads), or vegetative, spore, stalk and cup cells (white-red: 0–1 fraction of summed reads). Sets with maximally 10 or less reads are shown in wash-out color. The normalized transcript reads were retrieved from published [10,11,12] or novel RNA sequencing experiments and are all listed in Additional file 2: Table S1. Note that some developmental stages like “lawn” and “slug” are not represented in one or both Ppal and Dfas time courses. The transcript profiles are preceded by the first three and last two digits of the locus tags, while “a” and “b” represent replicate experiments, except for spore, stalk, cup and vegetative cells where the average of a triplicate experiment was used. Developmental stages: veg.: vegetative; lawn: starving cells, agg.:aggregation; tip: tipped mounds; slug:migrating slugs; culm.:early to mid fruiting bodies; fruit.: completed fruiting bodies, c.0 – c.48: hours into encystation