*2.2. Phylogenetic Analysis*

Alignments of the full eggplant Hsf and Hsp proteins were performed using clustal X2.1 [24]. Phylogenetic trees were constructed using the neighbor-joining (NJ) method in MEGA (version 5.0) [25] with bootstrap values from 1000 replicates indicated at each node. To identify signature domains, the Hsf and Hsp protein sequences were compared with Arabidopsis and tomato. *SmHsfs* and *SmHsps* (*sHsp*, *Hsp60s*, *Hsp70s*, *Hsp90s* and *Hsp100s*) were named based on the subfamily classification and their phylogenetic relationships with the corresponding *AtHsfs* and *AtHsps* and gene names of eggplant *sHsps* were revised according to their molecular weights in the eggplant genome database based on Hirakawa et al. [22].
