Fig. 1. Phylogenic relationship of the Vax gene family. (A) Lineage tree of vertebrate Vax genes using Emx genes as an `out group'. The out group branch separates Vax1 and Vax2 subgroups, both of which contain putative orthologues from different Classes of vertebrates, suggesting that the ancestral Vax gene was duplicated prior to the separation of the vertebrate Classes. Amino acid sequences from GenBank database entries were used. (B) Vax protein structure. Emx and Vax proteins share more than 60% amino acid sequence in the homeodomain (Hallonet et al., 1999), and additionally Vax proteins share nearly invariant homeodomains and have two Vax gene-specific conserved domains, VCDa and VCDb.

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