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Porcine relaxin, a 500 million-year-old hormone? The tunicate Ciona intestinalis has porcine relaxin

DANIELLE GEORGES^* and CHRISTIAN SCHWABE¹

^* UFR de Biologie, Universite Joseph Fourier-Grenoble 1, France; and
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, S.C. 29425, USA.

¹Correspondence: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Medical University of South Carolina, 171 Ashley Ave., Charleston, S.C. 29425, USA.

The fossil record of tunicates reaches back to the upper Cambrian period. Ascidians have mobile, tadpole-like juvenile forms with a notochord, which inspired the classification of tunicates as Urochordata, i.e., predecessors of vertebrates. The genome of the tunicate Ciona intestinalis contains a relaxin coding region that is organized like a mammalian gene, i.e., signal peptide, B-chain domain, connecting peptide domain, followed by the A-chain domain with a stop codon after cysteine A-22. RNA-derived cDNA encodes a relaxin that is identical to the circulating form of the porcine hormone. In contrast to the porcine gene, the ascidian gene has no intron in the C-peptide domain, and in that respect is similar to the bombyxin gene of the silkworm. During the spawning period, only enough relaxin could be extracted and isolated from gonads of C. intestinalis for a partial sequence analysis. Remarkable as it may be, these findings suggest that relaxin is identical in pigs, whales, and the tunicate C. intestinalis.—Georges, D., Schwabe, C. Porcine relaxin, a 500 million-year-old hormone? The tunicate Ciona intestinalis has porcine relaxin.

Key Words: relaxin coding region • DNA polymerase • genomic potential hypothesis

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