Human liver type pyruvate kinase: complete amino acid sequence and the expression in mammalian cells.

Pyruvate kinase (PK) has four isozymes (L, R, M1, M2) that are encoded by two different genes. Among these isozymes, abnormalities of liver (L)-type PK is considered to be associated with hereditary nonspherocytic hemolytic anemia in humans. We isolated and determined the full-length sequence of human L-type PK cDNA. The cDNA contains 1629 base pairs encoding 543 amino acids, 68 base pairs of 5'-noncoding sequence, and 734 base pairs of 3'-noncoding sequence. The similarity between human and rat L-type PK was 86.9% at the nucleotide sequence level and 92.4% at the amino acid sequence level. The full-length L-type PK cDNA was placed under the promoter of simian virus 40 and introduced into monkey COS cells. Human L-type PK activity was detected in the extract of COS cells by the classical PK electrophoresis method.