Extensive intragenic sequence homology in two distinct rat lens gamma-crystallin cDNAs suggests duplications of a primordial gene.

The nucleotide sequences of two different rat lens gamma-crystallin cDNA clones, pRL gamma 2 and pRL gamma 3, have been determined. pRL gamma 3 contains the complete coding information for a gamma-crystallin of 173 amino acids whereas pRL gamma 2 is incomplete in that it lacks the codons for the first three amino acids of a separate but very homologous gamma-crystallin of identical length. Both rat gamma-crystallins are homologous to the known amino acid sequence of bovine gamma-crystallin II which is only a single amino acid longer. The length of the region downstream the coding sequence to the A-A-T-A-A-A polyadenylylation signal sequence is 40 nucleotides in each clone. In pRL gamma 3 the poly(A) signal sequence is followed at 14 nucleotides by a remnant of the poly(A) tail which indicates that this clone contains a complete 3' noncoding region. pRL gamma 2 has only seven nucleotides following this signal sequence and no poly(A) tail, suggesting an incomplete 3' end. The cDNA clones show an overall nucleotide sequence homology of 85%. The mutual homology at the amino acid level is 73% whereas their amino acid homology with bovine gamma-crystallin II is about 70%. The nucleotide sequence of each clone also reveals a high intragenic homology and seems to be duplicated in itself. We suggest that the gamma-crystallin genes have arisen by multiple duplications of a primordial gene which consisted of about 120 nucleotides.