Fig. 1.

Alignment of cloned feline CSF-1R extracellular domain with human, pig and mouse. Alignment was performed using Clustal W (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/msa/clustalw2/). The alignment clearly demonstrates the high level of homology that exists in the CSF-1R extracellular domain containing the IL-34 and CSF-1 binding sites. Of particular note is the high level of homology between both the feline and canine CSF-1R (88%) and feline and human CSF-1R (83%) while the homology between feline and the mouse and pig CSF-1R share 75%and 80% homology respectively. The red colour represents small hydrophobic amino acids, blue colour represents acidic amino acids, magenta denotes basic amino acids, and the green colour corresponds to hydrophilic or polar amino acids. Identical amino acids are represented by “∗”, conserved substitutions are represented by “:” and semi-conserved substitutions are represented by “.”.