| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
MIURA Retsu KUMAMOTO UNIVERSITY,SCHOOL OF MEDICINE,PROFESSOR, 医学部, 教授 (70093466)
TANASE Sumio KUMAMOTO UNIVERSITY,SCHOOL OF MEDICINE,ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, 医学部, 助教授 (20112401)
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| Research Abstract |
Chemokine family is a group of cytokines involved in inflammation, virus infection and cell growth. There are now well over 40 chemokines including those cloned by our group. We found several ESTs encoding novel chemokines in the EST database and cloned the cDNAs encoding CC chemokines termed LARC (liver and activation-regulated chemokine), SLC (secondary lymphoid tissue chemokine), ELC (EBI 1-ligand chemokine), PARC (pulmonary and activation-regulated chemokine), LEC (liver-expressed chemokine) and CX3C chemokine fractalkine. We determined their gene loci. From these results, it is apparent that the genes for the CC chemokines which mainly attract monocytes cluster on Chr 17, whereas the genes for the CC chemokines which are mainly chemotactic for lymphocytes reside on the other chromosomes. We also characterized the PARC gene in the Chr 17 chemokine cluster, and found that the gene had been generated by fusion of two MIP-1alpha-like sequences. In addition, there is no mouse counterpart of the human PARC gene. This indicates that the PARC gene was generated after humans and rodents had diverged. These results suggest that CC chemokine genes were generated on Chr 17 by successive duplication events of the region containing the MIP-lalpha gene. Hence, the CC chemokines located on other than Chr 17 had emerged before most of the CC chemokines on Chr 17 were generated, and the genes recently generated by duplication such as the PARC gene are located in the large chemokine cluster on Chr 17.
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