The murine Ia alpha chains, E alpha and A alpha, show a surprising degree of sequence homology.

The I region of the murine major histocompatibility complex codes for a group of glycoproteins, the Ia antigens, thought to be involved in the control of immune responsiveness. Each Ia antigen complex contains a "heavy chain," a "light chain," and the "invariant chain." We describe here the isolation and characterization of genomic and cDNA clones for one of the heavy chains, Ak alpha. The complete nucleotide sequence of the cDNA clone is presented, and the predicted amino acid sequence is compared with that of another alpha chain, Ek alpha. About 50% of the amino acids are identical, a finding somewhat unexpected on the basis of preliminary protein sequence data.