Abdominal-B[edit]
Gene abd-B is transcribed in two different forms, a regulatory protein, and a morphogenic protein. Regulatory abd-B suppress embryonic ventral epidermal structures in the eighth and ninth segments of the Drosophila abdomen. Both the regulatory protein and the morphogenic protein are involved in the development of the tail segment.[8]
Classification of Hox proteins[edit]
Proteins with a high degree of sequence similarity are also generally assumed to exhibit a high degree of functional similarity, i.e. Hox proteins with identical homeodomains are assumed to have identical DNA-binding properties (unless additional sequences are known to influence DNA-binding). To identify the set of proteins between two different species that are most likely to be most similar in function, classification schemes are used. For Hox proteins, three different classification schemes exist: phylogenetic inference based, synteny-based, and sequence similarity-based.[11] The three classification schemes provide conflicting information for Hox proteins expressed in the middle of the body axis (Hox6-8 and Antp, Ubx and abd-A). A combined approach used phylogenetic inference-based information of the different species and plotted the protein sequence types onto the phylogenetic tree of the species. The approach identified the proteins that best represent ancestral forms (Hox7 and Antp) and the proteins that represent new, derived versions (or were lost in an ancestor and are now missing in numerous species).[12]