The a and P chains of spectrin are homologous, yet they have acquired different structural features that work in synergy to give the multimer its overall properties. The primary amino acid sequence of each spectrin subunit is dominated by tandemly repeated 106-residue motifs. By comparing the complete Drosophila f-spectrin sequence with other spectrins we have discovered evidence that a higher-order, 848-amino acid supra-motif is tandemly repeated in both aand .3-spectrin. These data argue that a-and (3-spectrin, rather than evolving independently from sequences encoding the ancestral 106-residue motifs, must have arisen after the establishment of a large supra-motif composed of eight of the 106-residue motifs. Our data suggest the segment structure of a progenitor gene that gave rise to both a-and 13-spectrin as well as dystrophin. The structural differences that evolved after the split between the a-and /3-spectrin genes confer the independent functions that exist in their products today.Spectrin is an important component of the membrane skeleton in most, if not all, cell types. The a and /3 subunits of spectrin are large, elongated polypeptides that have common evolutionary origins but have since acquired many distinct structural and functional attributes. For example, although the known a subunits are very similar to each other in molecular mass (-280 kDa), the molecular mass of known 13-spectrins range from 246 kDa to 430 kDa (1, 2). In addition, diversity in the /8 subunits is thought to account for most of the distinctive structural and functional attributes of different spectrin isoforms (3, 4).As first described by Speicher and Marchesi (5), a structural feature common to the a-and ,B-spectrin subunits is the presence of tandemly repeated 106-residue motifs that are also referred to as repeating units or segments (6). The repeating segments typically display a limited sequence similarity with one another and are defined by the presence of a consensus profile of conserved residues that occur at characteristic positions in each segment. Dystrophin and a-actinin, other members of the spectrin superfamily (7, 8), also contain homologous repetitive motifs. It has been postulated that a-spectrin arose by the serial duplication of an ancestral sequence that encoded the 106-residue segments, followed by the duplication of a larger block of DNA encoding several of these 106-residue segments (9-11). Here we present data showing that, rather than a simple duplication in a-spectrin alone, the repetitive regions of both present-day a-and P-spectrin genes were derived from a tandemly repeated supra-motif that encoded eight of the 106-amino acid motifs.tWe also find that the primary sequences of Drosophila and human ,B-spectrin are quite similar and coextensive except at their carboxyl-terminal ends.
MATERIALS AND METHODSNested deletions of two cDNA clones, B15 and B32, that contain the complete coding region of Drosophila f8-spectrin were generated by exonuclease digestion essentially as described (12). Nucle...