In article <3rvg6r$ac2 at cisunix1.dfci.harvard.edu>,
Ian A. York <york at mbcrr.dfci.harvard.edu> wrote:
>>Perhaps someone out there can save me a lot of plowing through
>references. How many human and mouse alleles of beta-2 microglobulin are
>there? (I had this information and I seem to have lost the paper. It
>was probably out of date anyway.)
Greetings, Ian,
It seems that you and I answer most of each other's articles in this
forum... maybe we should just email each other first before posting? Here's
what I know about beta-2 microglobulin polymorphism:
There are between three and sixteen alleles of mouse beta-2m, depend-
ing on how you want to define "allele" and how you want to define "mouse."
The low number is obtained by restricting yourself to alleles that show
substitutions at the amino acid level, in Mus musculus only. The high
number includes silent substitutions, and includes Mus spretus, Mus cervi-
color, Mus calori, and one or two other species whose abbreviations I can't
seem to decipher right now.
BTW, I'm reading this information compiled off of a phylogenetic
tree prepared by one of my colleagues. I haven't read all of the papers
from which this data was collected.
As for humans, the scuttlebutt here in the Parham lab is that there
is very little polymorphism, but that no one has looked very hard. If an
allelic variant of beta-2m has been found in humans, it would be news to me.
Hope that helps!
--
Unique ID : Ladasky, John Joseph Jr.
Title : BA Biochemistry, U.C. Berkeley, 1989 (Ph.D. perhaps 1998???)
Location : Stanford University, Dept. of Structural Biology, Fairchild D-105
Keywords : immunology, music, running, Green
