Thioredoxin-related protein-1 induced by prostaglandin E2.

Although the authors state three times throughout their paper that TRP-1 is a variant of the previously described TMX-2/CGI-31 protein they do not provide any DNA or protein sequence comparison to illustrate the degree of homology between both variants. When attempting to perform this comparison myself I found that TRP-1 DNA or protein sequences are not available at GenBank and two email requests to the corresponding author of the paper resulted in no reply. Therefore, the only alternative available was to type myself the complete mRNA sequence as published in the printed version and the resulting comparisons are shown in Figure 1 at the mRNA level (95.1% identity) and in Figure 2 at the protein level (92.2% identity). The TRP-1 and TMX-2/CGI-31 mRNAs mainly differ at two different regions centered at nucleotides 552 and 840 (Figure 1, based on TMX-2/CGI-31 nucleotide numbers) both within the ORF. The most striking result of these nucleotide changes is the conversion of the protein sequence WSNDC to WCGPC, which is the canonical sequence of thioredoxins active site. This feature prompted the authors to name thioredoxin-related protein-1 (TRP-1) to the new variant.