Analysis of latherin amino acid sequences.

(A) Alignment of the amino acid sequences of latherin from domestic horses (Equus caballus), Persian Onager (Equus hemionus), Damara Zebra (Equus burchellii antiquorum) and Ass (Equus asinus). Most of the substitutions between the proteins are infrequently exchanged according to established evolutionary substitution matrices [52], [53], except for an exchange of aspartic acid (D) and asparagine (N), as indicated by the symbol #. (B) Alignment of the amino acid sequence of Equus caballus latherin predicted from cDNA, beginning at the first amino acid position for which there was a matching peptide, with the new peptide sequences (LathPep1 to LathPep8) and the peptide fragments previously ascribed to separate allergens Equ c 4 and Equ c 5 [16]. (C) Amino acid composition of the mature form of latherin obtained from its cDNA sequence, showing that the protein is unusually enriched in leucines. The percent composition of each amino acid in latherin is plotted against the cumulative composition of all proteins entered into Swiss-Prot (http://www.expasy.ch/sprot/relnotes/relstat.html). The red line is a simple regression line, and the green lines delimit the 95% confidence intervals.