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Nature 308, 153-158 (8 March 1984) | doi:10.1038/308153a0; Accepted 31 January 1984

Sequence relationships between putative T-cell receptor polypeptides and immunoglobulins

Stephen M. Hedrick*, ‡, Ellen A. Nielsen*, Joshua Kavaler†, David I. Cohen*, † & Mark M. Davis        *, †, ‡

  1. *Laboratory of Immunology, NIAID, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20205, USA
  2. †Department of Medical Microbiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA
  3. ‡Present address: Department of Biology, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.
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Comparison of the sequence of a cloned T cell-specific cDNA with those of cross-reacting cloned cDNAs isolated from a thymocyte library indicates the presence of variable, constant and joining regions remarkably similar in size and sequence to those encoding immunoglobulin proteins. Together with the evidence for somatic gene rearrangements reported in the accompanying paper, this strongly suggests that the TM86 cDNA clone encodes one chain of the T-cell receptor for antigen.