Identification of a novel human angiopoietin-like gene expressed mainly in heart

The angiopoietins are an important family of growth factors specific for vascular endothelium. Most of them bind to the TIE2 receptor and are related to regulation of angiogenesis. During large-scale DNA sequencing of the human fetal brain cDNA library, we cloned a novel human angiopoietin-like cDNA and termed it human angiopoietin-like 5 ( ANGPTL5). Like other members of the angiopoietin family, ANGPTL5-deduced protein also has an N-terminal cleavable signal peptide, a predicted coiled-coil domain, and a fibrinogen-like domain. The search against the human genome database indicated that ANGPTL5 maps to 11q22. Expression analysis of ANGPTL5 shows that it is mainly expressed in adult human heart.