Subject: Ance etcetc
Dear David,
FlyBase is just catching up on the story of this gene, and (as you are
no doubt all too aware!) there is some work to do in sorting out a
complete and consistent story from the literature. In FlyBase at the
moment we have three separate genes: Ance, Race and l(2)34Eb. We have
looked at all the references we know of, namely the GenBank records
U25344 and U34599, the JBC paper from your group, the Mech. Dev. paper
from Mike Levine's group, and your respective abstracts from the Atlanta
fly meeting and the 1994 neurobiology meeting. It's not enough!
Our understanding so far is as follows:
\- Levine's group established the identity of 'Race' and l(2)34Eb
\- They did not establish that 'Race' had the predicted proteolytic
activity; hence the 'R'.
\- You did establish that activity.
\- They mapped their gene to 34E, you mapped yours to 34A.
\- The sequences differ by just enough to make us nervous -- about ten
differences, counting a 10bp-long frame shift as one.
The question of priority is a very close call -- it probably depends
on whether we count abstracts as publications, something where we have
never had a very clear policy -- but we are strongly in favour of using
Ance on the basis that ACE activity has been shown. However we would
rather like to be sure that there are not really two genes -- and even
that is not counting 'Acer' (GenBank X96913) from Alan Shirras!
So .... is there any more recent evidence (published or not) that shows
whether your and Levine's genes are the same? 34E is in the Ashburner
deficiency universe and 34A is not, so we are pretty sure that if it is
only one gene then it must be in 34E given Levine's data. Have you and
they resolved the sequence conflicts?
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Subject: Re: Ance etcetc
Dear Aubrey,
The Ance/Race/l(2)43Eb story.....
1. We believe that all three are the same: one of the sequencing
differences has been resolved - we had the frameshift, shown on
resequencing to be an error. The other erros are clustered and look
like sequencing errors - Tracy Williams in France resequenced much of
Ance while doing mutagenesis experiments, so we are confident our cDNA
is properly entered - the frameshift error has been corrected in the
GenBank entry. The other differences may be varietal - the protein
region affected at the N-terminus is not in a conserved part of the
gene, but as far as I know the Levine clone has not been rechecked The
C to S change may be important, or may be an error -at this stage we
don't know.
2. Our in situ data is much less reliable than Levine's -
we think the 34E location is right, not 34A
3. Acer is clearly different - maps to a different location, and is
very different at the sequence level - we are currently expressing it to see
whether is also is a peptidyl dipeptidase (1).
4. First _published_ reference to AnCE is
is in Biochem Soc Transactions (2).
1.	Taylor, C.A.M., Coates, D. & Shirras, A.D. Gene In press (1996).
2.	Cornell, M.J., Coates, D. & Isaac, R.E. Biochemical Society
Transactions 21, 243S (1993).
Hope this clears things up - I'm off to France for 12 months, but this
email address will still get me..
DavidC
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David Coates
Department of Biology
The University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
UK
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