Sequence and expression of Paracentrotus lividus alpha tubulin gene.

In an effort to study the regulation of tubulin gene transcription during sea urchin embryogenesis we isolated several genomic and cDNA clones encoding for a and j3 polypeptides (1,2). Here we report the sequence of a full length a tubulin cDNA. Comparison of the predicted amino acid sequence of the cDNA clone (a 1 tubulin), shown in Fig. 1, with that of other clones encoding for a different a tubulin isoform (1) shows only three amino acid replacements (indicated by asterisk), thus confirming the high level of conservation among the members of this gene family (3).