Journal of Biological Chemistry
Volume 273, Issue 46, 13 November 1998, Pages 30801-30807
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PROTEIN CHEMISTRY AND STRUCTURE
Novel Allergen Structures with Tandem Amino Acid Repeats Derived from German and American Cockroach*

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Cockroaches produce potent allergens that are an important cause of asthma. The two principal domiciliary cockroach species, Blattella germanica and Periplaneta americana, secrete major allergens, Bla g 1 and Per a 1. Here, we report the molecular cloning of three Bla g 1 cDNA clones, which showed 70% amino acid sequence identity with Per a 1. Plaque immunoassays with human IgE antibodies or murine monoclonal antibodies showed that these allergens were antigenically cross-reactive. The Bla g 1 sequences also showed homology to five previously undefined cockroach allergen sequences. An unusual feature of all these sequences was that they contained multiple tandem amino acid repeats of ∼100 amino acid residues. Between one and seven repeat units were identified by dot-plot matrix analysis. The sequences also showed homology to a mosquito protein involved in digestion (ANG12 precursor) and to mitochondrial energy transfer proteins. High levels of Bla g 1 were found in cockroach hindgut and proventriculus. Amino acid sequencing of natural Bla g 1 and Per a 1 suggested that these allergens are cleaved by trypsin-like enzymes following secretion into the digestive tract. The repeat sequences appear to have evolved by duplication of an ancestral amino acid domain, which may have arisen from the mitochondrial energy transfer proteins.

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*

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants AI 32557 and AI 34601.The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. The article must therefore be hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

The nucleotide sequence(s) reported in this paper has been submitted to the GenBank™/EMBL Data Bank with accession number(s) AF072219, AF072221, and AF072220.