Fig. 1

Analyses of sequences, phylogenetics, and tissue-specific expression patterns of IbVPE1; a IbVPE1 gene structure including the genomic sequence and full-length cDNA; yellow boxes indicate exons and blue lines indicate introns. b IbVPE1 amino acid sequence; gray boxes indicate essential amino acids for caspase-1 like activity. c the phylogenetic tree of IbVPE1 was constructed from alignments with VPE proteins from other species using the neighbor-joining method in MEGA 5.0 software. d Tissue-specific expression pattern of IbVPE1 in sweetpotato; IbTublin was used as an internal control