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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2022 Apr 1.
Published in final edited form as: Trends Neurosci. 2021 Jan 21;44(4):248–259. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2020.12.003

Figure 1. Rat and Drosophila Arc proteins form virus-like capsids via a conserved retroviral Gag capsid region.

Figure 1.

A. Representative negative stain EM images of purified rat Arc protein (prArc). Inset shows magnified Arc capsids (from [5]). B. Atomic resolution model of a dArc1 capsid derived from cryo-EM data as reported in [17] (image courtesy of Simon Erlendsson). C. Phylogeny based on an amino acid alignment of tetrapod Arc, fly dArc1, and Gag sequences from related Ty3/gypsy retrotransposons. In lineages without Arc genes, the most closely related sequences to Arc are Gag-pol polyproteins flanked by long terminal repeats (LTRs) as expected in bona fide Ty3/gypsy retrotransposons (from [5]).