Human nonmuscle myosin heavy chains are encoded by two genes located on different chromosomes.

We report the cloning of cDNAs encoding two different human nonmuscle myosin heavy chains designated NMMHC-A and NMMHC-B. The mRNAs encoding NMMHC-A and NMMHC-B are both 7.5 kb in size but are shown to be the products of different genes, which are localized to chromosome 22q11.2 and chromosome 17q13, respectively. In aggreement with previously reported results using avian tissues, we show that the mRNAs encoding the two myosin heavy chain isoforms are differentially expressed in rat nonmuscle and muscle tissues as well as in a number of human cell lines. The cDNA sequence encoding the 5' portion of the NMMHC-A isoform completes the previously published 3' cDNA sequence encoding a human myosin heavy chain, thus providing the cDNA sequence encoding the entire NMMHC-A amino acid sequence. Comparison of this sequence to cDNA clones encoding the amino-terminal one third of the NMMHC-B sequence (amino acids 58-718) shows them to be 89% identical at the amino acid level and 74% identical at the nucleotide level.