Figure 5.

Conservation of Col2a vWC structural and binding motifs. A, Conservation of amino acid residues of Col2a among species is shown pictorially using the ConSurf server (consurf.tau.ac.il)⁶ (65). Residues selected for our mutational analysis are labeled. Full sequence alignments are shown in supplemental Fig. S7. B, sequence alignment of vWC SD1s known to bind BMP-2. Col2a (human, Uniprot P02458), CV-2 (zebrafish, Q5D734), Chordin (mouse, Q9Z0E2), and CHL2 (mouse, Q8VEA6) were aligned using Clustal Omega. Conserved cysteines are highlighted in yellow and conserved π-π aromatic residues are in teal. Residues involved in Col2a binding to BMP-2 identified in this study are highlighted in purple. Residues previously shown to be involved in vWC binding to BMP-2 are highlighted in pink (18, 22).