Figure 1.

Alignment of the Xenopus heparanase 2 protein sequence with human and mouse orthologues. Xenopus heparanase 2 shares 80% identity (black highlight) and 88% similarity (black plus grey highlight) with human heparanase 2. The majority of non-conserved amino acids are in the N-terminal region (black bar), predicted to constitute a signal peptide. Putative HS-binding motifs are indicated by orange bars. Glycosylated amino acids are indicated by blue diamonds. Asn543, which undergoes a missense mutation in UFS (10), is conserved between species. The immunizing peptide used to generate the heparanase 2 antibody used in this study is indicated in green as is the nonsense mutation created by injection of the splice acceptor morpholino (MO1).