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The Transferrins from Amphioxus and the Molecular Evolution of Transferrin
Jian-Guo Du1, You-Min Feng, You-Shang Zhang
1State Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China.
Abstract:
An amphioxus transferring was isolated and purified from the Xiamen amphioxus. Its physio-chemical properties are the same as those of Qingdao amphioxus transferrin. It is a glyco-protein with a molecular weight of 26 kD that is about a quarter of that of the transferrin from vertebrates. Its partial amino acid sequence and its C-terminal fragment were determined. By comparison with the sequence of human serum transferrin, it has been found that the sequence of human serum transferrin can be divided into 4 fragments with about equal size as the sequences of the amphioxus transferrin. There is quite a high homology between the sequences of amphioxus transferrin and each of the 4 fragments as well as between the four fragments. The results demonstrate that the current transferrin may be evolved from an ancestor transferrin with one quarter of the molecular weight as a result of twice gene duplication. Amphioxus transferrin may be the representative from of such ancestor transferrin.