Figure 1

Phylogenetic analysis of Nematostella Strabismus. A) Alignment of NvStbm sequence with Stbm homologs from 10 metazoan taxa. The alignment was generated using ClustalW. Accession numbers used to obtain sequences for the alignment: Strabismus protein from N. vectensis (XP_001630420), Homo sapiens (NP_065068- 47% identity), Mus musculus (NP_808213- 48% identity), Xenopus laevis (NP_001083892- 47% identity) Danio rerio (NP_991313- 45% identity), Branchiostoma floridae (XP_002613474- 48% identity), Caenorhabditis elegans (NP_508500- 31% identity), Drosophila melanogaster (NP_477177- 41% identity), Hydra vulgaris XP_002160166 - 47% identity), Trichoplax adhaerens (XP_002107643 - 38% identity) and Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (41% identity). The percent identities of Stbm proteins from various taxa to NvStbm are indicated. Conserved amino acid residues across all nine taxa are shown in red. The regions highlighted in grey indicate the transmembrane regions and the region highlighted in yellow indicate the peptide sequence used to generate the anti NvStbm polyclonal antibody. B) Molecular phylogeny of Strabismus proteins from various metazoan taxa. Phylogenetic analysis of the NvStbm protein was carried out to determine orthology. Amino acid alignments including NvStbm and both vertebrate and invertebrate Stbm sequences were generated using MacClade [49]. A Bayesian Phylogenetic analysis was carried out using MrBayes 3.1 [50] with a run of one million generations, sampled every 100 generations. The summary consensus tree was generated in MrBayes using the last 7,500 trees and the posterior probabilities were calculated for this consensus tree. The posterior probability values for the consensus tree are shown.