Existence of Multiple Novel Gsalpha Splice Variants in Acute Leukemia Patients

The alpha subunit of the stimulatory G protein, Gsalpha, is involved in stimulation of the adenylate cyclase pathway of signal transduction. In this study, we investigated the status of the Gsalpha gene in 29 acute leukemia patients and identified three novel splice variants (designated GsalphaL-1,GsalphaL-2, and GsalphaL-3), possibly derived from aberrant splicing. All of the splice variants have in-frame deletions, removing the functional domain responsible for GTPase activity of Gsalpha, and would encode truncated proteins of 160(GsalphaL-1), 90(GsalphaL-2) and 70(GsalphaL-3) amino acids, respectively. The data suggest that these novel products may be implicated in an as-yet-unidentified signal transduction pathway in hematopoietic cells.