Genomic structure of metabotropic glutamate receptor 7 and comparison of genomic structures of extracellular domains of mGluR family

Metabotropic glutamate receptor 7, coupled with a chemical neurotransmitter L-glutamate, plays an important role in the development of many psychiatric and neurological disorders. To study the biological and genetic mechanism of the mGluR7-related diseases, a physical map covering the full-length mGluR7 genomic sequence has been constructed through seed clone screening and fingerprinting database searching. These BAC clones in the physical map have been sequenced with shotgun strategy and assembled by Phred-Phrap-Consed software; the error rate of the final genomic sequence is less than 0.01%. mGluR7 spans 880 kb genomic region, the GC content and repeat content of mGluR7 genomic sequence are 38% and 37.5% respectively. mGluR7 has a typical "house-keeping" promoter and consists of 11 exons, with introns ranging from 6 kb to 285 kb. mGluR7a and mGluR7b are two known alternatively splicing variants. Comparing the genomic structures of extracellular domains of mGluR family, their genomic structures can be subdivided into three groups, which are consistent with that of proteins. Although the genomic organization of mGluR7's group is conserved, the majority of introns in the extracellular segments vary dramatically. It is an obvious trend of the increasing intron size inverse proportion to phylogenetic time. Variation of genomic structure is higher than that of protein, which is attributed to the species characteristic regulation of gene expression.