Figure 5

Deduced gene structure, alternative splice and putative transmembrane protein profile of AaCHS1. (A) Gene structure: black boxes indicate constitutive exons, hatched boxes indicate mutually exclusive exons and gray boxes indicate introns. AaCHS1 is composed of ten exons (102; 534; 1,215; 594; 1,320; 177; 177; 204; 363 and 222 bp) and nine introns (28,587; 79; 61; 73; 58; 378; 5,620; 75 and 57 bp). Introns 1 and 7 are out of scale. The hatched bar underneath exons 5 and 6a marks the location of the fragment amplified by degenerate PCR. (B) Two options for AaCHS1 alternatively spliced edition: in AaCHS1a exon 5 is spliced with exon 6a and 7, leaving exon 6b outside while in AaCHS1b exon 5 is spliced with exon 6b and 7. (C) Alignment of predicted amino acid sequence of AaCHS1 exons 6a and 6b (see Additional File 2, Figure 2) using ClustalW software. TM: transmembrane alpha-helix span. Symbols below the aligned amino acid sequences indicate identical (*), highly conserved (:) and conserved (.) residues. (D) Predicted profile of AeCHS1 protein: transmembrane helices are indicated as vertical bars and regions inside or outside of the plasma membrane by horizontal bars. The hatched portion of the protein indicates the region coded by exon 6a or 6b (a segment containing a transmembrane domain).