Comparative human/murine sequence analysis of the common eliminated region 1 from human 3p21.3

Interspecies sequence comparison offers an effective approach to identify conserved elements that might have functional importance. We compared 1.32 Mb of C3CER1 (referred also as CER1) from human Chromosome (Chr) 3p21.3 to its orthologous regions on mouse Chr 9F. The corresponding mouse region was found divided into two blocks, but their gene content and gene positions were highly conserved between human and mouse. We observed that two orthologous mouse genes (Xtrp3s1 and Cmkbr1) were duplicated, and this resulted in two additional expressed mouse genes (Xtrp3 and Cmkbr111). We also recognized a large number of conserved elements that were neither exons, CpG islands, nor repeats. We further identified and characterized five novel orthologous mouse genes (Kiaa0028, Xtrp3sl, Fycol, Tmem17, and Lrrc2).