Functional equivalence of the clathrin heavy chains CHC17 and CHC22 in endocytosis and mitosis.

Clathrin is crucial for endocytosis and plays a recently described role in mitosis. Two clathrin heavy chains (CHCs) are found in humans: the ubiquitous CHC17, and CHC22, a CHC that is enriched in skeletal muscle. Functional differences have been proposed for these clathrins despite high sequence similarity. Here, we compared each paralogue in functional assays of endocytosis and mitosis. We find that CHC17 and CHC22 are functionally equivalent. We also describe how previous work on CHC22 has involved a splice variant that is not usually expressed in cells.