Fig. 5

Phylogenetic tree of 72 RPA homologs from 62 species. We found clear monophyletic grouping of the original RPA protein into the “core” eukaryotic clades such as plants, animals, fungi, Oomycetes and Alveolates. Within the clades the taxonomy widely reflects the diversification within these clades. The Helitron clade, which includes the Mothra RPA protein, however, forms an independent branch. Interestingly, it includes only representatives of the monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants. For the phylogeny we used a maximum likelihood approach using the software MrBayes (reversible jumping Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations for 4 million generations). The numbers at branches reflect confidence values (i.e. probabilities that sequences to the right of the fork group together in 6000 generated trees)