Figure 2.

Phylogenetic relationship of the Spi1C protein with other serpins. The sequence alignment was performed using ClustalW version 1.81. The phylogenetic tree was constructed by the neighbor-joining method using Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) version 4.0. Boot-strapping values were used to estimate the reliability of the phylogenetic reconstructions (1000 replicates). The numbers associated with the branches refer to bootstrap values (confidence limits) representing the substitution frequencies per amino acid residue. The serpins are identified by their GenBank accession numbers.