Figure 3: IRX homeodomain protein sequences and their
conservation . A) Multiple sequence alignment shows high conservation in
the DNA binding domain of IRX protein sequences. The difference at the
N-terminal can explain the recognition specificity of these proteins to
target DNA sequence B) Phylogenetic tree analysis highlighting highly
conserved sequences. The tree shows evolution of the IRX homeodomain and
also the functional specificity of the members of the family. The tree
was constructed using the maximum likelihood method and derived from
multiple sequence alignments of all IRX homeodomain region. The
bootstrap values at the nodes of the branches indicate the
maximum-likelihood of the sequence conservation between IRX proteins.