Alternative titles; symbols
HGNC Approved Gene Symbol: MT3
Cytogenetic location: 16q13 Genomic coordinates (GRCh38): 16:56,589,528-56,591,085 (from NCBI)
Uchida et al. (1991) identified a growth inhibitory factor in human brain and purified it to homogeneity. It was found to be a 68-amino acid protein, designated GIFB, with high homology to the metallothioneins (see 156350). The central domain of GIFB, amino acid residues 11-39, showed the highest homology to MT2A (156360). There were, however, 3-bp and 18-bp insertions in the coding sequence for the amino-terminal and carboxy-terminal domains, respectively, in comparison with MT2A. Such insertions had, it seemed, never been observed in vertebrate metallothioneins.
Tsuji et al. (1992) found that GIFB was expressed exclusively in the nervous system. The GIFB protein produced in an E. coli expression vector system inhibited the growth of neonatal rat cortical neurons. Northern blot analysis demonstrated that expression of the GIFB mRNA was drastically decreased in brain tissue from patients with Alzheimer disease (104300).
By Southern blot analysis of somatic cell hybrids, Tsuji et al. (1992) determined that, like the metallothioneins, GIFB is located on human chromosome 16.
Tsuji, S., Kobayashi, H., Uchida, Y., Ihara, Y., Miyatake, T. Molecular cloning of human growth inhibitory factor cDNA and its down-regulation in Alzheimer's disease. EMBO J. 11: 4843-4850, 1992. [PubMed: 1464312] [Full Text: https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1460-2075.1992.tb05590.x]
Uchida, Y., Takio, K., Titani, K., Ihara, Y., Tomonaga, M. The growth inhibitory factor that is deficient in the Alzheimer's disease brain is a 68 amino acid metallothionein-like protein. Neuron 7: 337-347, 1991. [PubMed: 1873033] [Full Text: https://doi.org/10.1016/0896-6273(91)90272-2]