What do lower case nucleotides mean in this gene sequence?
The case refers to the degree of conservation of a particular nucleotide in the consensus sequence. Highly conserved nucleotides are written in uppercase. At positions where the sequence varies, the most common nucleotide is given in lower case. That said, I'm not sure what the cut-off would be between "highly conserved" and "most common" and, in my opinion, is something that should be explained in the paper (though, in this case, it does not appear to be). This paper, for example, uses uppercase where a base is conserved in four of the five sequenced promoters. There may be some convention I am unaware of.