Figure 4. Comparison of the sarm gene structures in leech, human and shrimp.

The structural organization of Hm-sarm was deduced after analysis of the leech genomic library. The exons are boxes marked I-IX or I-VI. Thick boxes represent the coding regions and thin boxes represent the non coding regions. The introns are given as solid lines. The numbers specify the length (bp) of the exons and introns. On the transcripts, black Δ marked i1-i9 or i1-i5, indicate the position of the intron-exon junctions. Dashed lines point out that the position of an intron-exon junction is the same in leech and human genes.