The chicken conalbumin gene: studies of the organization of cloned DNAs

Abstract

The construction of a double-stranded conalbumin cDNA plasmid (1) has allowed us to investigate the structure of the conalbumin gene. Restriction enzyme mapping of chicken genomic DNA reveals that the conalbumin gene is split and is contained in three EcoRI fragments “a”, “b” and “c” which have sizes of 10.7, 4 and 2.5 kb, respectively. Analysis with specific probes shows that the orientation of these fragments with respect to transcription is 5′-“b”, “c” and “a”-3′. The fragments Eco “b”, Eco “c” and part of Eco “a” have been isolated by molecular cloning from three different “libraries”. Electron microscopic studies of hybrids between cloned DNAs and conalbumin mRNA show that one of the isolated clones, λC4-con1, contains the coding sequences for the first 940 nucleotides of the mRNA (out of 2400). This region is highly split, since it contains seven short exonic sequences separated by six intervening sequences. The DNA region coding for these 940 nucleotides is 5 times longer than the mRNA coding sequences, a ratio very similar to that found for other chicken genes.