Figure 2

Phylogenetic analysis of SLC1 genes marks duplication and deletion events. Maximum likelihood phylogeny of members of the zebrafish (dr), mouse (mm) and human (hs) SLC1 family. The phylogenetic tree was builtusing 370 representative amino acids determined by the program Gblocks after sequence alignment using MUSCLE. Bootstrap values above 50% (0.5) are shown. Zebrafish slc1 genes are shown in red. Note that in zebrafish several duplicated slc1 genes have been inactivated during evolution, but a duplicated gene for the SLC1A3 family has been retained. Interestingly two subfamilies (slc1a2 and slc1a7) contain even more than two putative zebrafish orthologs pointing towards the existence of species specific SLC1 subfamilies. The scale bar shows the percentage (0.2 equals 20%) of amino acid substitutions required to generate the corresponding tree. Note that using a Bayesian algorithm to calculate this tree reveals some potential differences in phylogeny (see Additional File 2).