Fig. 1. Comparison of sequence of zebrafish ß-catenin-2 with other ß-catenins. (A) ClustalW-generated sequence alignment of the least conserved regions of Xenopus ß-catenin (Accession Number AAA49670), goldfish ß-catenin (AAP94282.1), zebrafish ß-catenin-1 (AAC59732.1), zebrafish ß-catenin-2 (AAM53438.1), and computationally predicted ß-catenin-1 and ß-catenin-2 proteins from Fugu and Tetraodon (using Ensembl genomic data sets). Of the 55 amino acid differences between the two zebrafish ß-catenins, five changes are at positions 105-109 and 28 are in the N-terminal end of the protein (the same region that shows high levels of divergence in the predicted pufferfish ß-catenin-2 proteins). Based on sequences in these two regions, zebrafish ß-catenin-1 clearly forms a closely related group with the Xenopus and goldfish ß-catenins, and with pufferfish ß-catenin-1, whereas zebrafish and pufferfish ß-catenin-2 are more distantly related. (B) Maximum parsimony analysis of vertebrate and Ciona ß-catenin cDNA nucleotide coding sequences. Numbers indicate the hits supporting the branching pattern from 1000 bootstraps.