Cloning of mouse uncoupling protein 3 cDNA and 5'-flanking region, and its genetic map

Brown adipose tissue and skeletal muscle are important sites of non-shivering thermogenesis. It has been known that UCP1 and UCP2 function as the main effector of the thermogenesis: the former is expressed exclusively in brown adipose tissue, whereas the latter is distributed widely. Recently, the third UCP homologue was discovered in humans, which was designated as UCP3. We now report molecular cloning of full-length mouse UCP3 cDNA and its 5'-flanking genomic region. The mouse UCP3 cDNA sequence predicted a 308-amino acid protein, and the overall identity between the mouse and human UCP3 proteins was 85.6%. The mouse UCP3 amino acid sequence was 54.7% and 73.1% identical to the mouse UCP1 and UCP2, respectively. Expression of the mouse UCP3 was found to be abundant in skeletal muscle and somewhat less abundant in heart, but was minimally expressed in other critical organs. The sequences of 5'-flanking regions of the mouse UCP1 and UCP3 were very different, resulting in different distributions of putative transcriptional factor binding sites. The differences could reflect tissue-specific expression of the UCPs. The mouse Ucp3 gene was mapped near Ucp2 on chromosome 7, suggesting that the Ucp2 and Ucp3 are clustered genes. This region is boundary of synteny between human chromosome 11q13 and 11p15. As Solanes et al. reported that both human UCP2 and UCP3 genes are assigned to chromosome 11q13, the region where the mouse Ucp2 and Ucp3 are localized is syntenic to human chromosome 11q13.