Interspecific sequence comparison of the muscle-myosin heavy-chain genes from Drosophila hydei and Drosophila melanogaster.

The muscle-myosin heavy-chain (mMHC) gene of Drosophila hydei has been sequenced completely (size 23.3 kb). The sequence comparison with the D. melanogaster mMHC gene revealed that the exon-intron pattern is identical. The protein coding regions show a high degree of conservation (97%). The alternatively spliced exons (3a-b, 7a-d, 9a-c, 11a-e, and 15a-b) display more variations in the number of nonsynonymous and synonymous substitutions than the common exons (2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, and 19). The base composition at synonymous sites of fourfold degenerate codons (third position) is not biased in the alternative exons. In the common exons there exists a bias for C and against A. These findings imply that the alternative exons of the Drosophila mMHC gene evolve at a different, in several cases higher, rate than the common ones. The 5' splice junctions and 5' and 3' untranslated regions show a high level of similarity, indicating a functional constraint on these sequences. The intron regions vary considerably in length within one species, but the corresponding introns are very similar in length between the two species and all contain stretches of sequence similarity. A particular example is the first intron, which contains multiple regions of similarity. In the conserved regions of intron 12 (head-tail border) sequences were found which have the potential to direct another smaller mMHC transcript.