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The glycoprotein (GP) Ib/IX complex, a prominent platelet GP complex, is the primary receptor for vWF. Previously, we have established that an antigenic polymorphism of platelets, the HPA-2 or Ko alloantigen system, is located on the 45-kD amino-terminal globular domain of GPIba. With the polymerase chain reaction, we have amplified two segments of the GPIba gene coding for the first 382 amino acids of two HPA-2a and two HPA-2b homozygous individuals. Nucleotide sequence analysis revealed as the only difference a C-T polymorphism at position 434 of the coding region for the mature protein. This base change results in a substitution of threonine (ACG) in HPA-2a (Ko") to methionine (ATG) in HPA-2b (Ko*) at amino acid position 145. The C-T polymorphism is reflected in a difference in restriction enzyme recognition, resulting in an Aha 2-site in the HPA-2b allele and a SfaN1 site in the HPA-2a allele. Restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis of the amplified DNA of 3 HPA-2(a-,b+), 2 HPA-2(a+,b+), and 11 HPA-2(a+,b-) donors showed that these restriction sites were associated with the HPA-2 alleles. DNA-typing for the HPA-2 alloantigen system on genomic DNA obtained from a small number of cells may be applied for determining the genotype of a fetus from an immunized mother or of severely thrombocytopenic patients. (J. Clin. Invest. 1992. 89:381-384.) Key

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Antibodies to the snRNP proteins B' and B are frequently observed in autoimmune diseases. We analyzed different types of cDNAs encoding these proteins. One type of cDNA encoded a protein whose predicted mol. wt is 24.6 kd, whereas another type encoded a protein with a predicted mol wt of 23.7 kd. When translated in vitro from cDNA transcripts, the apparent mol. wts of these proteins on SDS‐polyacrylamide gel were 29.5 and 28.5 kd respectively. The main difference between these two types of cDNAs proved to be the presence of an additional sequence of 146 nucleotides in the 3′ part of the open reading frame of the clone encoding the shorter protein. This insert contains a termination codon in frame, at 9 nucleotides downstream from the 5′ end of the insert. The additional sequence revealed at the 3′ end a consensus sequence of vertebrates for intron‐exon junctions. We demonstrated the presence of mRNAs corresponding with both types of cDNA in human cells. We hypothesize that the B' and B protein are derived from one pre‐mRNA by alternative splicing, and show that they differ only at the carboxy terminus, where a proline rich motive is repeated once more in B'. A comparison with amino acid sequences of other cloned snRNP proteins is included.