Fig. 6.

Effects of porphyrin compounds on i-motif formation in B. mori testis cells. Testes were isolated from 5th instar larvae and treated as described in “Materials and Methods” section. The porphyrin compound TMPyP4 (a, c, e, h and j) or TMPyP2 (b, d, f, i and k) at 1 (h, i), 5 (j, k), 30 (a, b), 50 (c, d) or 70 µM (e, f) was added to the testis culture medium before immunofluorescence analysis. The red fluorescence signals show the binding of BmILF to i-motif structures in the nuclei. The nuclei were counterstained with DAPI (blue). g, l Quantification of i-motif staining signals for 50 nuclei in five randomly selected observation regions on the slide. The data are represented as the mean ± SEM of three replicates