“…FGFs 1-9 range in size from ϳ150 to 260 amino acid residues and have a conserved ϳ120-amino acid residue core with ϳ30 to 70% sequence identity (Ornitz and Itoh, 2001;Itoh and Ornitz, 2004). Based on their conserved amino acid sequences, Fgfs 10 -14 and 16 -23 were isolated by conducting a homology-based polymerase chain reaction or identified by homology-based searches in nucleotide sequence databases (Yamasaki et al, 1996;Smallwood et al, 1996;Miyake et al, 1998;Hoshikawa et al, 1998;Nishimura et al, 1999Nishimura et al, , 2000Ohmachi et al, 2000;Nakatake et al, 2001;Yamashita et al, 2000). In addition, Fgf15 was identified as a downstream target of the chimeric homeodomain oncoprotein E2A-Pbx (McWhirter et al, 1997).…”