Human tissue surfaces are coated with mucins, a family of macromolecular sugar-laden proteins serving diverse functions from lubrication to the formation of selective biochemical barriers against harmful microorganisms and molecules. Mucin proteins carry long stretches of tandemly repeated sequences that undergo extensive O-linked glycosylation to form linear mucin domains. The repetitive nature of mucin domains makes them prone to recombination and renders their genetic sequences particularly difficult to read with standard sequencing technologies. Our recent work, published in PLOS ONE, leveraged a recent human genome assembly to characterize a previously unmapped MUC3B gene located at the q22 locus on chromosome 7, within a cluster of four structurally related membrane mucin genes that we name the MUC3 cluster.
This work was a collaboration with Tiange Lang at Big Data Decision Institution, Jinan University, China.
Read our paper here.
Compete genomic, mRNA and protein sequences for mucin genes MUC3A, MUC3B, MUC12 and MUC17 in the human MUC3 cluster can be downloaded from the Mucin database (v 2.2).