Characterization of Major Surface Protease Homologues of Trypanosoma congolense

Figure 3

Clustal-W generated dendogram comparing T. congolense putative MSPs with predicted homologues from T. brucei TREU927, T. brucei gambiense, T. vivax, T. brucei rhodesiense, T. cruzi, and Leishmania sp. (taxid 5658). Predicted protein sequences were obtained in a TBLASTN search against the translated genome database for each species indicated. The top three homologues were obtained for each T. congolense putative MSP independently for each species indicated. Redundant retrievals were eliminated. Protein sequence alignments were generated and prepared for presentation using ClustalX ver 2.0.7 [12]. Phylogenic trees were generated by ClustalX using the bootstrapped N-J method with 1000 iterations. The unrelated E. coli protease HflB was included as an outgroup for alignment. Trees were prepared for presentation using PhyloDraw ver 0.8 as radial trees. Note that the terminal arms have been extended for clarity of presentation and labeling and therefore should not be considered in interpreting phylogenetic distance. T. congolense putative MSP proteins are indicated in bold lettering. The T. brucei homologues previously characterized by LaCount et al. [7] are indicated for comparison. Nodes populated solely from individual proteins from T. cruzi and Leishmania sp. are indicated by blue and red dashed circles, respectively. The individual putative proteins represented by numbers in the tree are listed by number in Table 1. Full amino acid sequences for the proteins represented here are available in the supplementary information as is a phylogenetic tree with bootstrap values and genetic distance indicated.