Sequence alignment of Spi1C protein with other bacterial serpins. The serpins are identified by their GenBank accession numbers. The sequence similarity searches were performed using the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) 2.0 program. The amino acid sequence alignment of the target putative protein with homologous proteins was performed using the AlignX program, a component of the Vector NTI suite (InforMax, North Bethesda, MD, USA), using the blosum62mt2 scoring matrix. P1 denotes the start codon of reactive center loop (RCL) conserved domain. The potential RCL sequence regions are in boxed.