FIG. 6.

Alignment of plasmodial and trypanosomatid AspATs. (A) Clustal alignment of a portion of the P. falciparum AspAT with the deduced amino acid sequences of gene fragments obtained from the P. vivax and P. berghei sequence tag projects (9). (B) Clustal alignment of portions of the C. fasciculata cytoplasmic AspAT and T. brucei brucei cytoplasmic (c) AspAT with the deduced amino acid sequence of a gene fragment obtained from the L. major genome project (35). For both sets of sequences, the boxed residues were conserved by all three sequences, the residues above the sequences are those reported to be conserved in all aminotransferases in the Ia subfamily (23), and the residues marked with asterisks are those reported to be conserved in all aminotransferase families (33). The residues underlined in the L. major fragment represent the amino acid sequence determined by Vernal et al. (45) from a purified L. mexicana enzyme. The numbers in parentheses represent the total length of the amino acid sequence obtained for each enzyme.