Figure 1.

Alignment of the predicted protein sequence of Drosophila Smad4/Medea with those of human Smad4, Mad, and Dad. The first methionine of Medea shown was chosen based on its similarity to that of human Smad4. The open reading frame encodes 745 amino acids. Dashes were inserted to maximize the alignment score. Residues identical to those of Medea are highlighted. The region located between triangles is the linker. Medea and Smad4 are highly conserved in the MH1 and MH2 regions. Note that Medea is longer than human Smad4 by ∼200 amino acids because of its long linker region. The Medea sequence has been deposited in GenBank with accession number AF057162.