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. 2019 Apr 23;20(8):1996. doi: 10.3390/ijms20081996

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Phylogenetic tree demonstrating the divergence of merlin from the ERM proteins. The upper arbor shows ERM proteins spanning early branching metazoa through to vertebrates. The vertebrate ERMs diverge into distinct ezrin, radixin and moesin clades (top right). The lower arbor shows merlin proteins again spanning early branching metazoa through to vertebrates. Near the center of the tree lie various merlin-ERM proteins where it is not clear that they can be classified as either merlin or ERM from sequence analysis alone. We note that there are multiple choanoflagellate proteins (red branches) that appear to represent distinct merlin and ERM proteins. Sequences were obtained from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, US National Library of Medicine) non-redundant protein database using the program BLAST [14]. Multiple sequence alignment and neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree were constructed with the program MUSCLE [15] using the EMBL-EBI webserver. The tree was drawn using the program FigTree v1.4.2 [19].