Figure 2.

Sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis of PTTH amino acid sequences indicate that Cupip-PTTH is more similar to its counterparts in other mosquitoes than to Drosophila. A: Sequence of Cupip-PTTH was compared with PTTHs from Culex quinquefasciatus (Cuqui), Aedes aegypti (Aeaeg), Anopheles gambiae (Angam) and Drosophila melanogaster (Drmel). Open diamond indicates the putative cleavage sites that release mature PTTH, and seven filled triangles indicate seven conserved cysteines. Conserved amino acid residues are indicated as white letters in a black background; similar residues are indicated as white letters in a gray background; non-conserved residues are indicated as black letters in a white background; gaps, indicated as broken lines, are inserted to optimize the alignment. The numbers of amino acid residues are designated arbitrarily for sequence alignment and are not their exact positions in the full sequences. B: Evolutionary relationship of Culex pipiens, Culex quinquefasciatus, Aedes aegypti, Anopheles gambiae, and Drosophila melanogaster based on PTTH amino acid sequences. Phylogenetic analyses were conducted in MEGA4 (Tamura et al., 2007). Evolutionary history is inferred using the Neighbor-Joining method and evolutionary distances were computed using the Poisson correction method. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths in units of the number of amino acid substitutions per site.