Alternative splicing of murine SorCS leads to two forms of the receptor that differ completely in their cytoplasmic tails

We report the identification of a splice variant of SorCS, a member of the family of VPS10 domain containing receptors. These type I transmembrane pro teins share the presence of internalization signals in their cytoplasmic ta il as one common characteristic. We show that an alternatively spliced tran script of SorCS is generated by differential processing of a composite inte rnal/terminal exon. This splice variant encodes a protein with an N-termina l VPS10 domain followed by a leucine-rich module and a transmembrane domain identical with the already described SorCS protein, but a divergent cytopl asmic tail. In contrast to the known intracellular regions of the related r eceptors, this splice variant contains no internalization or sorting signal s. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.