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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Sep 1.
Published in final edited form as: Dev Biol. 2014 Jun 25;393(1):93–108. doi: 10.1016/j.ydbio.2014.06.016

Fig. 2. Identity of the Drosophila exp gene.

Fig. 2

(A) Exp is a Smad-like protein containing an MH2 domain (grey box). Exp exists in two isoforms: Exp-A (1025 aa) and Exp-B (513 aa). The first 477 amino acids (grey and black boxes), including the MH2 domain (55-222 aa), are identical in both isoforms. An anti-Exp antibody that recognizes both isoforms was generated against an Exp fragment containing amino acids 233-477 (black line). The same region was used to generate an exp probe that recognizes both isoforms. The region that was used to generate a specific exp-A probe that recognizes exp-A is shown. (B) Exp belongs to a distinct subfamily of Smad-like proteins. The alignment is represented by a phylogram generated using the neighbor-joining method. The tree demonstrated that Dro-Exp, Ano-AGAP007416, Dro-CG13183, and Ce-C34E11.2C represent a distinct, evolutionarily conserved subfamily of Smad proteins that we named the Exp subfamily. Protein sequences of the MH2 domains of Smad proteins were compared and aligned using ClustalW. The scale represents the fraction of nonidentical amino acid residues along each branch. The species designation precedes each protein acronym (Dro, Drosophila melanogaster; Ano, Anopheles gambiae; Ce, Caenorhabditis elegans; Hum, human).