Associations of distinct variants of the intestinal mucin gene MUC3A with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease

Ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease Introduction (CD), the major forms of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs), are multifactorial disorders of unknown etiology. We reported a possible association of rare variable number of tandem repeat (VNTR) alleles of the MUC3 gene with a susceptibility to UC. However, an entire structure of MUC3 is still unknown because the long stretches of tandem repeats in this gene make its cloning extraordinarily difficult. In this study, we report evidence that MUC3 consists of two genes, MUC3A and MUC3B, both of which encode membrane-bound mucins with two epidermal growth factor-like motifs, and we describe the complete 3'-terminal structures of these two genes. We have also analyzed the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the exonic sequences of the 3' portions of these two genes to investigate whether sequence variations in these regions can cause person-to-person differences in the susceptibility to IBDs, and report here that non-synonymous SNPs of MUC3A, involving a tyrosine residue with a proposed role in cell signaling, may confer genetic predisposition to CD (P = 0.0132). Our findings suggest that variants of MUC3A may be involved in the occurrence of UC and CD in distinct manners.