Characterization of a mammalian smooth muscle myosin heavy-chain gene: complete nucleotide and protein coding sequence and analysis of the 5' end of the gene.

The purpose of this study was to characterize the complete cDNA sequence encoding the rabbit smooth muscle myosin heavy chain (MHC) and determine the exon/intron organization at the 5' end of the corresponding gene. The full-length cDNA sequence of 6644 base pairs encoding a protein of 1972 amino acids was generated from two cDNA clones: PBRUC1 (approximately 6.3 kilobases), isolated from a rabbit uterus cDNA library, and PBRU-PCR33 (420 base pairs), produced by primer extension and PCR amplification. Compared with the chicken smooth muscle MHC sequence [Yanagisawa, M., Hamada, Y., Katsuragawa, Y., Imamura, M., Mikawa, T. & Masaki, T. (1987) J. Mol. Biol. 198, 143-157] the rabbit MHC shares about 90% amino acid identity in the S1 globular head region but shows a striking sequence divergence at the junction between the 25-kDa and 50-kDa proteolytic fragments of the functionally important S1 head domain. Genomic cloning shows that the rabbit smooth muscle MHC gene is large and has an unusual exon/intron organization at the 5' end. The first eight contiguous exons are located within a region of at least 70 kilobases of genomic DNA. Some introns span several kilobases of DNA and others at the 5' end show a high degree of intron conservation in the Mg(2+)-ATPase domain when compared with more distantly related sarcomeric MHC genes. Primer extension and S1 nuclease mapping analysis demonstrate that transcription initiates from a single site in the rabbit smooth muscle MHC gene.