*2.1. Alignment and Phylogenetic Tree of 5*′*UTRs of Human ABCA Genes*

Based on the alignment analyses of the individual human ABCA genes with their vertebrate orthologs, we were able to define the sub-regions of the 5′UTRs showing a very high level of conservation. The names, IDs and basic characteristics of the transcripts analyzed are disclosed in Table S1 and positions of these sub-regions are recorded in Table S2. Notably, we did not find any comparable highly conserved sub-regions in the alignment of all human ABCA genes together. Figures S1 and S2 document the alignment of human *ABCA1* and its orthologs for ClustalO and Mafft algorithms, respectively. Figures S3 and S4 show the alignment of all human ABCA genes in a similar manner. A phylogenetic tree, based on the 5′UTR sequences of all human ABCA genes, was constructed and is shown in Figure 2.

The order in which 5′UTRs of ABCA genes are described in the following sections reflects their relationships calculated in the phylogenetic analysis.

**Figure 2.** Phylogenetic analysis of 5′UTR sequences of 12 human ABCA genes. The neighbor-joining tree was constructed using DNA model distance measure of Clustal Omega multiple sequence alignment.
