| Abstract: | We report the nucleotide (nt) sequence of a full length cDNA clone, pCA15, which encodes the human muscle-specific carbonic anhydrase, CAIII. pCA15 identifies a 1.7-kb mRNA, which is present at high levels in skeletal muscle, at much lower levels in cardiac and smooth muscle and which appears to be developmentally regulated. The CAIII mRNA is distinguished by a 887-nt long 3'-untranslated region, containing two AAUAAA signal sequences and is longer than either of the mRNAs encoding the erythrocyte CAs, CAI and CAII, which each have relatively shorter 3'-untranslated regions, 360 and 670 nt long, respectively. The derived amino acid (aa) sequence for human CAIII shows 85% homology with ox CAIII, 62% homology with human CAII and 54% with human CAI when simple pairwise aa comparisons are made. We describe an allelic variation at a TaqI restriction site for CAIII which occurs at high frequency in the European population. |
