Assignment of the murine ankyrin-repeated protein gene (Ankrd2) to mouse chromosome 19C3-->D1 and rat chromosome 1q51-->q53 by fluorescence in situ hybridization.

The human ANKRD2 gene was isolated from a cDNA library of human esophageal carcinoma cell line by immunoscreening (Moriyama et al., 2001), and independently cloned from two other laboratories in relation to skeletal muscle development and stretch-induced hypertrophy (Kemp et al., 2000; Pallavicini et al., 2001). It encodes an ankyrin-repeated protein highly homologous to the cardiac-restricted ankyrin repeat protein (CARP, now designated as ANKRD1), which is a nuclear protein and may serve as a transcriptional negative regulator for MLC-2v in cardiomyogenesis (Zou et al., 1997). Since ANKRD2 and ANKRD1 expression normally found in various muscle tisssues were elevated in different types of musclerelated lesions (Pallavicini et al., 2001; Ishiguro et al., 2002; de Waard et al., 2003), these genes might have an important role not only in the normal myogenetic differentiation but also in the pathogenesis of muscle-associated disorders. We have previously mapped the human ANKRD2 on chromosome band 10q24 (Moriyama et al., 2001) and successively the mouse homolog of ANKRD2 was isolated (Tsukamoto et al., 2002). We report here the localization of Ankrd2 on mouse and rat chromosomes by fluorescence in situ hybridization together with the determination of the gene order of Ankrd2 and Ankrd1 in human, mouse, and rat. Materials and methods