Figure 1.

Strategy of the specification of peroxisome targeting signals (PTS) for higher plants by bioinformatics analyses. The genes of peroxisomal matrix proteins that were cloned from Arabidopsis were supplemented by the Arabidopsis orthologs of known PTS1- and PTS2-targeted matrix proteins from other plant species identified by sequence similarity. These proteins were used as query for the identification of a maximum number of homologous full-length cDNA sequences as well as EST sequences containing the targeting domain in the databases by bioinformatics analyses. The peroxisomal targeting domains of all homologs were then analyzed for conserved properties, such as amino acid sequence of the PTS, amino acid composition and charge of adjacent sequences, and secondary structure.