Analysis of the sheep MUC1 gene: structure of the repetitive region and polymorphism

An investigation was undertaken with the aim of studying the repetitive region of the MUC1 gene and analyzing its polymorphisms in some Italian sheep breeds. Two primers previously used for the goat MUC1 gene analyses allowed for the amplification of 4 different alleles. The sequence analysis showed that the repetitive region of the sheep MUC1 gene is an array of 60-bp repeats, in accordance with the information reported in humans, cattle, and goats. The polypeptide sequence encoded by the consensus repeat was very similar to the corresponding sequences of goats and cattle. The average homology of all repeated units was 82%; when the repeats were compared with the derived consensus repeat, homology dropped to 78%. The repeats were not all perfectly conserved, but the sequence homology was nevertheless clearly sufficient to preserve the mechanism giving rise to the variable-number tandem-repeat polymorphism. In spite of their reduced sequence homology, the sheep repeats shared a high number of potential glycosylation sites. The conservation of the exact number and position of glycosylation sites did not seem to be very important for the purpose of functional integrity, but glycosylation appeared to be conserved as a bulk property. Analysis of the polymorphism in 6 Italian breeds showed that the sheep repetitive region seemed to be less variable and smaller in size than the repetitive region of the goat. The findings of this study suggest that ruminants can be a useful model to study the mechanisms by which the variation in the repeat number and the extracellular domain size can modulate the effectiveness of MUC1 as a cell-surface shield.