Figure 1

Amino acid sequence alignment for the 14 full-length serpins in rice ( Oryza sativa cv. Nipponbare) with the Arabidopsis AtSerpin1 sequence and secondary structure. The Arabidopsis AtSerpin1 sequence and secondary structure assignments were from the X-ray crystal structure [PDB: 3LE2] [7]. Rice sequences were obtained from the Rice Genome Annotation Project (Michigan State University), edited where required according to the text and aligned using ClustalW (accurate) using default parameters (gap opening penalty = 10, gap extension = 0.05, Blosum30 series protein weight matrix). Note the sequence shown for OsSRP-PLP does not include the 45-residue N-terminal extension supported by full-length cDNA evidence as described in the text. Residues are coloured according to physico-chemical properties: Black, small; Green, medium-sized and large hydrophobic; Pink, polar; Red, negatively charged; Blue, positively charged [47]. *, identical residues in all rice serpins; +, conserved residues in all rice serpins (according to colour scheme above); ·, conserved residues in 11–13 of the 14 rice serpins (according to colour scheme above); ><, intron-exon boundary for all rice serpins in alignment except OsSRP-QKG, which lacks an intron.