CLONING AND EXPRESSION OF CDNAS FOR THE ALPHA-SUBUNIT OF THE MURINE LYMPHOCYTE-PEYERS PATCH ADHESION MOLECULE

cDNA clones encoding the ce chain of the murine lymphocyte-Peyer's patch adhesion molecule (LPAM), which is associated with lymphocyte homing, have been isolated by screening with the human VLA-4 (alpha-4h) probe. Several alpha-4 antigenic determinants were identified on COS-7 cells after transfection. From overlapping clones, approximately 5 kb of contiguous nucleotide sequence have been determined, encoding a protein sequence of 1039 amino acids for the LPAM alpha-chain (alpha-4m). LPAM is a member of the integrin family of cell-surface heterodimers, and alpha-4m is the murine homologue of the human alpha-4h chain. The two proteins have a total sequence similarity of 84%, with an almost perfect conservation (31/32 amino acids) in the cytoplasmic domain. Like alpha-4h, alpha-4m is distinct from other integrin alpha-chains because it has neither an I-domain nor a COOH-terminal cleavage site. The positions of the characteristic Cysteine residues are conserved, and a putative protease cleavage site is located near the middle of the protein sequence. The NH2-terminal part of the protein contains seven homologous repeats, and three of them include putative divalent cation-binding sites. These sites are among the most conserved between the alpha-4m sequence and other ce chains, and may therefore be involved in the binding of integrin alpha and beta-chains, An additional cDNA clone was isolated which shares a sequence of perfect homology with the alpha-4m encoding CDNAS, but has a unique 3' poly-A end. This observation correlates with the fact that three discrete murine RNA bands are observed in Northern blot experiments using alpha-4m as a probe, whereas only two human RNA species are described for alpha-4h, indicating a higher complexity for murine than for human sequences.