Developmental and Tissue-specific Expression of Mouse Pelle-like Protein Kinase*
- Marina Trofimova‡,
- Amy B. Sprenkle§,
- Melissa Green‡,
- Thomas W. Sturgill§,
- Mark G. Goebl‡ and
- Maureen A. Harrington‡¶
- From the ‡ Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Medicine and the Walther Oncology Center, Indiana University, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202-5121 and the
- § Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22908
- ¶ Scholar of the Leukemia Society of America. To whom correspondence should be addressed: Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Indiana University, 975 W. Walnut St., Indianapolis, IN 46202-5121. Tel.: 317-274-7527; Fax: 317-274-7592.
Abstract
The NF-κB/c-Rel proteins are a family of evolutionarily conserved transcription factors activated during development that in the adult, mediate many processes including the immune response. A high degree of sequence similarity is shared between the NF-κB/c-Rel family of transcription factors and the Drosophila Dorsal protein as well as between its cytoplasmic inhibitor, IκBα, and the Drosophila Cactus protein. Genetic analyses of Dorsal have defined components of a signaling pathway for Dorsal activation, including a serine/threonine kinase, Pelle, placed upstream of Dorsal and Cactus. We demonstrate that this pathway is likely to be conserved in mammals by the isolation of a cDNA that encodes a novel mouse protein highly related to Pelle, mPLK (mouse Pelle-like protein kinase). Expression of mPLK mRNA is developmentally regulated in the mouse and in adult tissue mPLK expression is greatest in the liver, a tissue that expresses a high level of NF-κB. Recombinant mPLK produced in bacteria is a protein kinase capable of autophosphorylating and phosphorylating IκBα.
Footnotes
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↵* This research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health Grants GM43972 (to M. A. H.) and GM45460 (to M. G. G.) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (to T. W. S.). The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. The article must therefore be 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) U56773[GenBank].
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1 The abbreviations used are:
- PCR
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polymerase chain reaction
- mPLK
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mouse Pelle-like protein kinase.
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- Received April 23, 1996.
- Revision received May 23, 1996.
- © 1996 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
