Molecular Characterization and Expression of Heparan-sulfate 6-Sulfotransferase
COMPLETE cDNA CLONING IN HUMAN AND PARTIAL CLONING IN CHINESE HAMSTER OVARY CELLS*
- From the Institute for Molecular Science of Medicine, Aichi Medical University, Nagakute, Aichi 480-11, Japan
Abstract
Heparan-sulfate 6-sulfotransferase (HS6ST) catalyzes the transfer of sulfate from 3′-phosphoadenosine 5′-phosphosulfate to position 6 of the N-sulfoglucosamine residue of heparan sulfate. The enzyme was purified to apparent homogeneity from the serum-free culture medium of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells (Habuchi, H., Habuchi, O., and Kimata, K. (1995)J. Biol Chem. 270, 4172–4179). From the amino acid sequence data of the purified enzyme, degenerate oligonucleotides were designed and used as primers for the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction using poly(A)+ RNA from CHO cells as a template. The amplified cDNA fragment was then used as a probe to screen a cDNA library of CHO cells. The cDNA clone thus obtained encoded a partial peptide sequence composed of 236 amino acid residues that included the sequences of six peptides obtained after endoproteinase digestion of the purified enzyme. This cDNA clone was applied to the screening of a human fetal brain cDNA library by cross-hybridization. The isolated cDNA clones contained a whole open reading frame that predicts a type II transmembrane protein composed of 401 amino acid residues. No significant amino acid sequence identity to any other proteins, including heparan-sulfate 2-sulfotransferases, was observed. When the cDNA for the entire coding sequence of the protein was inserted into a eukaryotic expression vector and transfected into COS-7 cells, the HS6ST activity increased 7-fold over the control. The FLAG fusion protein purified by anti-FLAG affinity chromatography showed the HS6ST activity alone. Northern blot analysis revealed the occurrence of a single transcript of 3.9 kilobases in both human fetal brain and CHO cells. The results, together with the ones from our recent cDNA analysis of heparan-sulfate 2-sulfotransferase (Kobayashi, M., Habuchi, H., Yoneda, M., Habuchi, O., and Kimata, K. (1997) J. Biol. Chem. 272, 13980–13985), suggest that at least two different gene products are responsible for 6- and 2-O-sulfations of heparan sulfate.
Footnotes
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↵* This work was supported in part by special coordination funds from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization and from the Science and Technology Agency of the Japanese Government; by a grant-in-aid for research at the Division of Matrix Glycoconjugates, Research Center for Infectious Disease, Aichi Medical University from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture of Japan; and by a special research fund from Seikagaku Corp.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 sequences reported in this paper have been submitted to the DNA Data Bank of Japan and the GenBank™/EMBL Data Bank with accession numbers AB006179 (human mRNA) and AB006180(hamster mRNA).
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↵‡ To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel.: 81-52-264-4811 (ext. 2088); Fax: 81-56-163-3532; E-mail:kimata{at}amugw.acihi-med-u.ac.jp.
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↵1 The abbreviations used are: HS6ST, heparan-sulfate 6-sulfotransferase; HS2ST, heparan-sulfate 2-sulfotransferase; CHO, Chinese hamster ovary; HPLC, high performance liquid chromatography; PCR, polymerase chain reaction.
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↵2 H. Habuchi and K. Kimata, unpublished observations.
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- Received August 19, 1997.
- Revision received December 8, 1997.
- The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
