Striking sequence similarity over almost 100 kilobases of human and mouse T-cell receptor DNA

We report here the comparative DNA sequence analysis of nearly 100 kilobases of contiguous DNA in the C delta to C alpha region of the alpha/delta T cell receptor loci (TCRAC/TCRDC) of mouse and man. This analysis--the largest genomic sequence comparison so far--provides new insights into the functions of the T cell receptor genes as well as the surrounding chromosome structure through the identification of actively conserved DNA sequences. In this comparison we have identified a very high level of organizational and noncoding sequence similarity (approximately 71%) in contrast to previous findings in the beta-globin gene cluster. This observation begins to question the notion that much of the chromosomal non-coding sequence is junk.