Mouse Zp1 Encodes a Zona Pellucida Protein Homologous to Egg Envelope Proteins in Mammals and Fish (*)
- From the Laboratory of Cellular and Developmental Biology, NIDDK, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892
- §Supported by post-doctoral fellowships from “Istituto Pasteur-Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti” and from “Stiftelsen Blanceflor Boncompagni-Ludovisi, nee Bildt”. To whom correspondence should be addressed: Laboratory of Cellular and Developmental Biology, NIDDK, Bldg. 6, Rm. B1-26, NIH, 6 Center Dr. MSC 2715, Bethesda, MD 20892-2715. Tel.: 301-496-2738; Fax: 301-496-5239.
Abstract
Zp1 encodes one of the three major glycoproteins of the zona pellucida, an extracellular matrix that surrounds growing oocytes, ovulated eggs, and preimplantation embryos. The mouse gene is composed of 12 exons ranging in size from 82 to 364 base pairs and spans 6.5 kilobase pairs on chromosome 19 (2.13 ± 1.5 centimorgans distal to D19Bir1). The Zp1 exon map is similar to ZPB, a human orthologue, and an E-box (CANNTG), implicated in oocyte-specific gene expression of mouse Zp2 and Zp3, is similarly located upstream of the transcription start site. The single copy Zp1 gene encodes a 623-amino acid protein, the carboxyl-terminal half of which is significantly similar to a corresponding region of mouse ZP2. The conservation of this same region in a fish egg envelope protein suggests that not only has this protein domain been duplicated in mammals but that it has been conserved and used as an egg envelope protein in species that diverged 650 million years ago.
Footnotes
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↵* The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore by hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
The nucleotide sequence(s) reported in this paper has been submitted to the GenBank™/EMBL Data Bank with accession number(s) U24227[GenBank]-U24230[GenBank].
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↵1 The abbreviations used are:
- bp
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base pair(s)
- kb
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kilobase pair(s)
- cM
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centimorgans.
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2 L. Rowe, personal communication.
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↵3 A Ginsberg, unpublished observations.
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- Received May 5, 1995.
- Revision received September 5, 1995.
- © 1995 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
