Abstract
We reported previously the isolation of a cDNA clone, designated NKG5, encoding a secreted protein that is expressed only in natural killer and T cells and is strongly upregulated upon cell activation. In this report we have isolated the NKG5 gene from a human placental genomic library and sequenced the gene and two kilobases of 5'-flanking DNA. Comparison with the cDNA sequence reveals that the NKG5 gene consists of five exons and four introns. Intron 1 contains a DNA segment that was reported to occur as an exon in 519, a closely related cDNA clone that was isolated from a T-cell library. This result indicates that NKG5 and 519 are alternative splicing products of a single gene. The 5′-flanking region of the NKG5 gene was analyzed for homology with the promoter regions of cytokines and other activation-induced genes showing lymphocyte-specific expression. Several segments displaying sequence similarity were identified. We also identified numerous sequence elements that have strong similarity to known binding sites for transcriptional regulatory proteins including T-cell-specific and activation-specific regulatory factors. These findings are consistent with the cell-specific expression and the tight regulatory control that is observed for the NKG5 gene.
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The nucleotide sequence data reported in this paper have been submitted to the GenBank nucleotide sequence database and have been assigned the accession number M85276.
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Houchins, J.P., Kricek, F., Chujor, C.S.N. et al. Genomic structure of NKG5, a human NK and T cell-specific activation gene. Immunogenetics 37, 102–107 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00216832
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00216832