Fig. 1: PfCERLI2 is conserved among Apicomplexa and may have evolved from an ancestral gene duplication.

a PfCERLI2 is a protein of 579 amino acids in P. falciparum 3D7. Towards its N-terminus PfCERLI2 contains a motif with the consensus sequence PHIS[-]xxP we have termed PHIS, a C2 domain, and a decapeptide tandem repeat with the consensus sequence QTEIkNDhi at its C-terminus. Repeat number (10–20), and therefore PfCERLI2 amino acid length (559–659), is highly variable between P. falciparum isolates. b Amino acid sequence identity for Plasmodium spp. PfCERLI2 orthologues in Laverania, human-infecting, and rodent-infecting parasites was compared using multiple pairwise alignments. c Tanglegram comparing general evolutionary relationships between selected Apicomplexa and Chromerids, as described in ref. ⁷¹ (left), with phylogenetic tree constructed with PfCERLI1, PfCERLI2 and homologus sequences retrieved from EuPathDB using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) method (right). Branch length of UPGAM tree corresponds to amino acid substitutions per site. Taxa containing CERLI1 and CERLI2 homologues are joined by red edges, while taxa with a single CERLI are joined by black edges to visualise timing of ancestral gene duplication giving rise to CERLI2.