Fig. 6. Mest encodes a highly conserved, vertebrate-specific hydrolytic enzyme. (A) Phylogram of the multiple sequence alignment of the predicted protein sequences for Mest from several vertebrate and invertebrate genomes. Organisms are as labelled. Note that the most similar proteins from C. elegans, D. melanogaster and Ciona intestinalis group together and are relatively dissimilar from the other proteins. In all three organisms, the most similar protein in the mouse or human genome is not Mest but is instead a hydrolase lacking the hydrophobic N terminus. (B) Multiple sequence alignment of the vertebrate Mest protein sequences demonstrate a very high level of conservation among the different organisms.