Fig. 1. Analysis of Parkin amino acid sequence conservation and developmental expression. (A) Schematic of human and Drosophila Parkin and PARK2 proteins. The ubiquitin-homology domain is an N-terminal domain, followed by the first RING finger domain (R1), an in between ring (IBR) domain, and a second RING finger domain (R2). Similarity and identity values for each domain are shown. (B) Multiple sequence alignment of human, mouse and Drosophila Parkin proteins shows a high degree of conservation throughout the lengths of the proteins. Solid boxes indicate identities; shaded boxes represent similarities. (C) Developmental northern analysis of parkin expression. A 1.6 kb parkin transcript is first detected in 0-2 hour embryos but is undetected in subsequent embryonic stages. parkin is again expressed during third instar larval (3L), early (E), mid (M) and late (L) pupal stages, as well as in adults. RP49 was used as a loading control on the same filter.