Figure 12.

Theoretical phylogenetic relations of signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT) family proteins. The sequence of the human STAT3 was used to search for STAT homologs among the non-redundant sequences in selected organisms using NCBI PSI-BLAST. A score of 2 × 10⁻⁵ was used as a threshold. Similarities of the selected sequences were determined using BLOSUM62 matrix and E-INS-i strategy (219). Sequences were manually curated using AliView software [(218); http://ormbunkar.se/aliview/], and the resulting final alignment was used to generate a neighbor joining phylogenetic tree (NJ, bootstrap 1,000×).