The HipHop/K81 protein family. A tree representing the schematic phylogeny of Drosophila species as described by Yang et al. [62]. For each species, the HipHop/K81-like proteins are represented as rectangles. These proteins were identified by tBLASTn search in Flybase (http://flybase.org/blast/). For the 8 new sequenced Drosophila genomes (biarmipes, elegans, eugracilis, ficusphila, bipectinata, rhopaloa, takahashii, and kikkawai), which are not yet annotated, an ORF corresponding to the protein was identified and used to determine the putative whole protein sequence (see also Table 1) except for D. elegans-HipHop due to poor sequence quality (*). HipHop-like or K81-like proteins are proteins more closely related to HipHop or K81, respectively, whereas proteins whose phylogenetic origin was ambiguous HipHop or K81, are referred to as HipHop/K81-like proteins. For each protein, we identified the PTV or QFVH motif (see text) in the C-terminal domain that was described by Gao et al. [58] as responsible for the functional divergence between HipHop and K81 in sperm telomere protection. This PTV/ QFVH motif is indicated for each protein in the corresponding rectangle. BLAST analysis using 5 kbp upstream and downstream the hiphop/K81-like genes allowed to identify the orthologous region in the melanogaster genome. A same color code and a line connecting proteins indicate that the synteny block is conserved between the corresponding genes.