Figure 1: Two paralogous proteins in T. brucei methyltransferases belong to a family of methyltransferases that includes mammalian METTL6.

(a) A UPGMA tree was generated following multiple sequence alignment of S. cerevisiae TRM140 (NP_014882.4) with orthologous sequences from other organisms using MEGA6. Multiple sequence alignment was accomplished with the MUSCLE algorithm. The UPGMA tree was generated from the alignment with default parameters and 10,000 bootstrap replicates. Bootstrap values are displayed as percentages at each tree node. (b) Sequence alignment of the two T. brucei paralogs (TbTRM140 and TbMTase37) with mammalian methyltransferase-like 6 (METTL6). Black boxes (*) indicate identical amino acids shared among the sequences, while amino acids highlighted in gray (: or .) denote conservative changes. The putative SAM-binding domain is indicated by the black filled rectangle labeled “AdoMet Binding Domain” and it is conserved in all four proteins.