Figure 1

(a) Structures of selected members of the human WNT gene family. Exons are shown as boxes and introns as lines. For each gene, 'RNA' represents the portion of the gene that is transcribed and 'CDS' represents the portion that encodes protein. WNT8a/d is an example of a gene with 3' alternative splicing and WNT16 is an example of a gene with alternatively used 5' exons. (b) Structural features of the Wnt protein. The amino terminus contains a signal sequence (S). All Wnts contain 23 or 24 conserved cysteine residues (C) with similar spacing, suggesting that the folding of Wnt proteins depends on the formation of multiple intramolecular disulfide bonds.