[Conserved and variable segments of the snake phospholipase A2 amino acid domain]

Homologous amino acid sequences of phospholipases A2 of snakes belonging to families Elapidae, Viperidae and Colubridae were considered in order to study the location of conservative and variable regions. To identify significant conservative and variable regions a comparison between two groups of aligned sequences of snake phospholipases A2 was successfully applied. The phospholipases A2 sequences were divided into two groups (taxons) according to the phylogenetic tree reconstructed from the pair distance matrix. Results of the comparison were plotted to facilitate the identification of significant conservative and variable regions. It was shown, that the results of the comparison between two phylogenetic groups of snake phospholipases A2 didn't depend much on the number of each group representatives, and the location of conservative and variable regions didn't significantly change if one of the groups was represented by the single sequence. It should be mentioned, that the more the phylogenetic difference between groups of phospholipases A2 the more was the number of significant conservative and variable regions. The knowledge of the number and location of conservative and variable regions and their dependence on phylogenetic relations between the compared taxons can be used to predict the synthetic peptide structure to obtain antibodies of various specificity. These antibodies may have either a wide range of cross-reactivity against all of phospholipases A2 or a limited range of cross-reactivity against phospholipases A2 of one taxon.