Figure 6: Organization of multi-gene families in P. falciparum.

a, Telomeric regions of all chromosomes showing the relative positions of members of the multi-gene families: rif (blue) stevor (yellow) and var (colour coded as indicated; see b and c). Grey boxes represent pseudogenes or gene fragments of any of these families. The left telomere is shown above the right. Scale: ∼0.6 mm = 1 kb. b, c, var gene domain structure. var genes contain three domain types: DBL, of which there are six sequence classes; CIDR, of which there are two sequence classes; and conserved 2 (C2) domains (see text). The relative order of the domains in each gene is indicated (c). var genes with the same domain types in the same order have been colour coded as an identical class and given an arbitrary number for their type (b) and the total number of members of each class in the genome of P. falciparum clone 3D7. d, Internal multi-gene family clusters. Key as in a.