CLONING OF THE MOUSE HSP25 GENE AND AN EXTREMELY CONSERVED HSP25 PSEUDOGENE

A genomic clone of the murine gene encoding the small heat-shock prote in, Hsp25, was isolated. The coding region is interrupted by two intro ns of 128 bp and approximately 600 bp at identical positions as the hu man hsp27 gene. The 5' flanking regions of the mouse and human genes a re very strongly conserved and contain several sequence motives for th e transcription factors, HSF and Spl. In the same screen we also isola ted a hsp25 pseudogene. The sequence conservation between this pseudog ene and hsp25 cDNA is very high (99%) indicating that this pseudogene emerged very recently.