Figure 1

Goat RSPO1 characterization and phylogeny. a) Goat RSPO1 cDNA structure is compared with seven RSPO1 bovine Expressed Sequence Tag (EST), two human transcripts and the human gene. Genbank accession numbers of the different sequences are given on the left. A bovine-specific 5' non-coding exon 1 is depicted in red. The goat-specific part of exon 1 is depicted in pink. In goat, the second ATG (ATG₁₅) is not conserved in human (ACG₁₅). Sp = Signal peptide; Fu = Furin domain; Tsp = Thrombospondin domain; Nls = Nuclear localization signal; AG = conserved acceptor spicing site. b) A Neighbor-Joining tree was constructed with 28 DNA sequences from the four RSPO genes belonging to seven mammalian species, plus the putative goat RSPO1 ORF (the corresponding goat sequence is depicted in bold). Confidence values (higher than 50%) after bootstrap test are shown at each node. Genbank accession numbers are given in the methods section.