Identification of alternatively spliced transcripts for human c-myb: molecular cloning and sequence analysis of human c-myb exon 9A sequences.

The murine c-myb gene has been recently shown to code for two protein products of 75kd and 89kd. The 89kd protein appears to be generated from an alternatively spliced mRNA which contains an additional stretch of 363 bases between exons 9 and 10. In this communication, we have examined whether similar alternatively spliced mRNAs of c-myb occur in human cells. Human c-myb exon 9A has been identified and sequenced in a cDNA clone (ML5) generated from the acute myeloid leukemic cell line ML-2. This alternatively spliced exon of c-myb has been found to contain the same number of nucleotides (363bp) as the corresponding mouse exon. Between murine and human exon 9A sequences, 81% sequence homology was found at the DNA level, while the homology at the predicted amino acid level was found to be 73%. A stretch of 14 amino acid residues at the junction of exons 9A and 10 have been found to be conserved between Drosophila and human sequences indicating that this region might perform an essential biological function which was deemed necessary through evolution.