Cloning and expression analysis of human reticulon 4c cDNA

RTNs (reticulons) is a gene family related to the growth and differentiation of neuroendocrine cell. This family is composed of several members such as RTN1, RTN2 and RTN3. RTN1 and RTN2 have been proved to have 3 transcripts with different length. Because the RTN1c cDNA was involved in the sologenesis of small cell lung carcinoma (SCLC), it was selected as a bioinformatic probe to clone novel members of RTN family with the electric hybridization assistant new-gene cloning method (EHAC). A 1677-bp cDNA was identified from human brain cDNA library. The cDNA contains an intact open reading frame (ORF) which encodes a protein of 199 amino acids. This deduced protein is highly homologous to RTN1c, RTN2c and RTN3 with identities of 64.4% 45.8% and 50.0% respectively. This new gene was named RTN4c (GenBank accession number: AF087901). Northern hybridization showed that the full length of RTN4c transcript is about 1.8 kb. It is hardly expressed in heart, placenta, lung, spleen, thymus, testis, ovary, small intestine and peripheral blood white cells; but it is highly expressed in the tissues of skeletal muscle, brain, liver and kidney, and less expressed in the pancreas, prostate and colon. Furthermore, Northern results also showed that there is a 2.3 kb transcript expressed in 14 tissues except liver and skeletal muscle; while another 5.0 kb transcript in brain, skeletal muscle and testis. By the electric hybridization walking, we obtained two full-length contigs with a length of 4632 and 2235 bp respectively. The former encodes a protein with 1192 amino acids and was defined as RTN4a: the latter encodes another protein with 373 amino acids. and was named RTN4b. The RTN4 gene was mapped to human chromosome 2p14–p13 region by the radiation hybridization (RH).