Defensin,existing in the right arm of the second chromosome of drosophila melanogaster,encodes a product which possesses an anti-bacterial peptide activity and resists Gram-positive bacteria.
Zoa was first isolated from Z. officinale, which belongs to Zingiberaceae family.The full-length cDNA of zoa was 768bp with an opening reading frame of 510bp encoding a protein with 169 amino acids.