Cloning and characterization of human CADPS and CADPS2, new members of the Ca2+-dependent activator for secretion protein family.

The recent identification of some of the components involved in regulated and constitutive exocytotic pathways has yielded important insights into the mechanisms of membrane trafficking and vesicle secretion. To understand precisely the molecular events taking place during vesicle exocytosis, we must identify all of the proteins implicated in these pathways. In this paper we describe the full-length cloning and characterization of human CADPS and CADPS2, two new homologs of the mouse Cadps protein involved in large dense-core vesicle (LDCV)-regulated exocytosis. We show that these two genes have disparate RNA expression patterns, with CADPS restricted to neural and endocrine tissues and CADPS2 expressed ubiquitously. We also identify a C2 domain, a known protein motif involved in calcium and phospholipid interactions, in both CADPS and CADPS2. We propose that CADPS functions as a calcium sensor in regulated exocytosis, whereas CADPS2 acts as a calcium sensor in constitutive vesicle trafficking and secretion. CADPS and CADPS2 were determined to span 475 kb and 561 kb on human chromosomes 3p21.1 and 7q31.3, respectively. The q31-q34 of human chromosome 7 has recently been identified to contain a putative susceptibility locus for autism (AUTS1). The function, expression profile, and location of CADPS2 make it a candidate gene for autism, and thus we conducted mutation screening for all 28 exons in 90 unrelated autistic individuals. We identified several nucleotide substitutions, including only one that would affect the amino acid sequence. No disease-specific variants were identified.