Fig. 4

TERT in highly regenerative triclad planarians. a The 11 flatworm species used in this study. Abbreviations represent: Pple (Procerodes plebeja), Dlac (Dendrocoelum lacteum), Pnig (Polycelis nigra), Pfel (Polycelis felina), Djap (Dugesia japonica), Dryu (Dugesia ryukyuensis), Dben (Dugesia Benazzi), Dtah (Dugesia tahitientis), Smed (Schmidtea mediterranea), Slug (Schmidtea lugubris) and Gtig (Girardia tigrina). b Gel image showing full length RT-PCR results of TERT transcripts and isoforms from 11 planarian species (NTC represents no cDNA template control for the PCR). c Domain structure of planarian TERTs; mollusc TERTs and hTERT were used for comparison. Multiple sequence alignments of the (d) N-terminal linker and (e) C-terminal extensions from planarians and the trematodes. Boxes also denote planarian-specific motifs with their respective descriptions written inside. f TERT gene structure of hTERT, S. mediterranea, G. tigrina and the liver fluke Opisthorchis viverrini (Trematoda Class) are shown. Purple triangles indicate conserved intron positions (relative to hTERT intron positions) and green triangles indicate Platyhelminthes-specific introns. Genomic sequence data is not available for other planarian species. Therefore, putative TERT exon-intron boundaries were annotated based on Smed_TERT data and confirmed by AS variant analyses of each species