Polymorphisms in the coding and noncoding regions of murine Pgk-1 alleles

The mouse X-linked Pgk-1 gene encodes phosphoglycerate kinase. When transfected into human cells, the Pgk-1b allele causes the appearance of mouse PGK-1b enzyme activity. We describe here cloning of mouse Pgk-1a, an allele of Pgk-1 which encodes an enzyme, PGK-1a, with distinct electrophoretic mobility. We constructed recombinants between the DNA encoding Pgk-1b and Pgk-1a and transfected these constructs into human cells to assess the electrophoretic characteristics of each recombinant. In this way the charge variation between the two proteins was localized to exons 4 or 5. Sequencing of these exons revealed a single base-pair difference between the two alleles at codon 155, which predicts the amino acids lysine and threonine in PGK-1b and PGK-1a, respectively. A number of other DNA sequence polymorphisms exist between Pgk-1b and Pgk-1a including part of an L1 repeated element unique to Pgk-1a.