Protein sequence relationship between derived African elephant leptin protein and other members of cyclical cytokine family.

The class I helical cytokine superfamily has been described earlier. The sequence relationship between the derived elephant leptin protein sequence and other members of cyclical cytokine family was therefore analyzed. An alignment of class I helical cytokine family members was prepared using MUSCLE and phyml used to generate a tree using the WAG model and 100 replicates were used to generate bootstrap values. These were then combined into a single tree by hand and colored by cytokine sub-family. The relationship of the African elephant leptin protein was determined relative to the sequence in other mammalian species, to contextualize the relationship of elephant leptin structure to that of leptin in other species. The global tree is available as a supplemental figure (Figure S2).