Use of synthetic oligonucleotides as hybridization probes: isolation of cloned cDNA sequences for human beta 2-microglobulin.

We have synthesized two sets of 15-base-long oligodeoxyribonucleotides corresponding to all possible coding sequences for a small portion of human beta 2-microglobulin. Labeled oligonucleotides were used as hybridization probes to screen bacterial clones containing cDNA sequences primed with oligo(dT) and inserted into the plasmid vector pBR322. One beta 2-microglobulin cDNA clone was detected in the 535 bacterial plasmid clones that were screened. The clone has been characterized by blotting and nucleotide sequence analysis. The cloned beta 2-microglobulin sequence contains 217 base pairs of the 3' untranslated region of the mRNA and 328 base pairs (97%) of the coding region.