CLONING AND PARTIAL CHARACTERIZATION OF THE CDNA-ENCODING THE FOX SPERM PROTEIN FSA-ACR.1 WITH SIMILARITIES TO THE SP-10 ANTIGEN

We have isolated and character ized a cDNA, cFSA-Acr.1, encoding a tes tis-specific fox sperm antigen. The antigen is located on the inner ac rosomal compartment, and is expressed during spermatogenesis on the de veloping acrosome of round and elongating spermatids. Database searche s with the deduced amino acid sequence of cFSA-Acr.1 revealed that the clone has high homology to both human and baboon sperm protein SP-10, and the mouse sperm protein, MSA-63. The region of highest homology i s within the carboxyl terminus. In the middle of the open reading fram e, the fox sequence shows unique sequences absent from both the human, baboon SP-10, and mouse MSA-63 sequences. In addition to cFSA-Acr.1, two other clones were also isolated from the same fox testis cDNA libr ary, and sequence analysis shows that they may represent alternatively spliced mRNAs coding for other FSA-Acr proteins. (C) 1995 Wiley Liss, Inc.