Figure 4.

Human VEGF-C and -D are processed in a very similar fashion. The major difference between VEGF-C and -D is that ADAMTS3 activates VEGF-C, but not VEGF-D. This is one of the reasons why ADAMTS3 and VEGF-C are essential for lymphatic development and embryonic survival [14,42], whereas VEGF-D deletion in mice is well tolerated [53]. While the figure shows the exon structure of VEGF-C and -D, mRNA splice isoforms have only been reported for murine Vegfc [54]. The detected splice variants do not contain the full VEGF homology domain and are therefore not shown here. *Cleavage site is only predicted based on the amino acid context.