IDENTIFICATION THROUGH BIOINFORMATICS OF CDNAS ENCODING HUMAN THYMIC SHARED AG-1 STEM CELL AG-2 - A NEW MEMBER THE HUMAN LY-6 FAMILY/

The Ly-6 family of cell surface molecules includes many members that h ave been characterized in the mouse. Until recently, very few Ly-6 fam ily members had been described in the human. A significant development with important implications for novel gene discovery has been the gro wth of the public Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) database, Here we repor t that, through the application of bioinformatics analysis to the dbES T database, we obtained the sequence of human TSA-1/ SCA-2, a new memb er of the human Ly-6 family, In addition, we identified Cull-length cl ones encoding this molecule as well as expression data in various tiss ues, Sequencing of the clones identified this way confirmed the sequen ce predicted through bioinformatics, This study constitutes an example of the application of bioinformatics to the analysis of the recently expanded databases for the identification of genes of potential import ance in the immune system.