Fig. 1. Sequence analysis of Hyzic. (A) Schematic of the predicted HyZic protein showing the zinc finger domain located in the C-terminal part. Numbers represent amino acid positions. (B) Alignment of the zinc finger domain of HyZic (Hydra-Zic) with various Zic proteins and Gli proteins from other phyla. The Cysteine and Histidine residues of the C₂H₂ motifs are boxed in red. Identical amino acids or conservative changes in all sequences are boxed in black; sequences with >80% similarity are boxed in gray. Note, that HyZic contains a number of diagnostic residues of the Zic protein subfamily. (C) Phylogenetic tree of Zic, Gli and Macho zinc finger motifs using the maximum likelihood program TREE-PUZZLE (Schmidt et al., 2002). The analysis is based on CLUSTALW alignments. Numbers are percent statistical support. HyZic clusters showed >90% statistical support to the Zic protein family, when the more derived Ciona sequences were removed from the analysis (data not shown).