Fig. 1. Comparative genomics identifies T. brucei components of motile flagella. (A) Overview of the strategy used to identify and characterize TbCMF genes. Genomes of organisms with motile cilia or flagella (H. sapiens, M. musculus, D. melanogaster, L. major, T. cruzi, C. reinhardtii and C. intestinalis) were compared to the T. brucei genome for common genes, then those genes found in organisms that have non-motile flagella or lack flagella (C. elegans and A. thaliana, respectively) were subtracted. Homology was confirmed by protein alignments and reciprocal BLAST analysis. To determine whether the subset of 41 functionally uncharacterized proteins have a role in motility, RNAi mutants were analyzed (see Materials and Methods for details). (B) Amino acid sequence alignment of TbCMF 9 with top BLAST hits from humans (Hs, accession number AAI09127) and C. reinhardtii (Cr, protein ID C_230118). Amino acids highlighted in yellow and blue are identical in all or most sequences, respectively; green highlighting represents conservative substitutions. The RNAi region is underlined and the borders of the SMC domain in TbCMF 9 are denoted by red arrowheads.