Figure 1

Conservation of sterol biosynthetic genes in eukaryotic algae. The color key (top) indicates the similarity of the gene to the closest match and ranges from low similarity (black) to high similarity (red). Black areas indicate no Blastp hit below the applied e-value threshold (1e-5). Red areas indicate orthologs with Blastp e-values below 1e-100. Color in the heatmap is scaled column-wise based on the bit values of tblastn results (Additional file 1). Abbreviations: red alga Cyanidioschyzon merolae (Cm), diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum (Pt), diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana (Tp), diatom Fragilariopsis cylindrus (Fc), eustigmatophyte N. oceanica (No), brown alga Ectocarpus siliculosus (Es), green alga Ostreococcus tauri (Ot), green alga Micromonas sp. RCC299 (Mi), green alga Chlorella variabilis NC64A (Cv), green alga Coccomyxa subellipsoidea C-169 (Cs), green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (Cr), and green alga Volvox carteri (Vc). See Additional file 2: Figure S1 for the phylogenetic tree of the sampled species.