Two alpha heavy chain disease proteins with different genomic deletions demonstrate that nonexpressed alpha heavy chain genes contain methylated bases.

Two independently arising alpha heavy chain mutants have been found to synthesize heavy chains with CH1 deletions of approximately equal extent. Both were isolated from heavy chain-producing variants of the mouse myeloma W3129 and demonstrate that it is possible to arrive at the heavy chain disease phenotype by the pathway H + L leads to H leads to delta H. Analysis of genomic DNA by digestion with restriction endonucleases followed by molecular hybridization showed that one mutant (delta 37) had a deletion of approximately 0.2 kilobase and the second mutant (delta 15) had a deletion of approximately 0.5 kilobase. Mouse myeloma cells contain several alpha chain alleles but only one is expressed; the presence of the deletion in delta 37 and delta 15 made it possible to identify the restriction fragments from the expressed allele. Analysis of the fragments produced after cleavage with an isoschizomeric pair of restriction enzymes, Msp I and Hpa II, indicated that, in the W3129 cell line and its variants, the unexpressed alpha alleles contain methylated bases. The influence of methylation on gene expression remains to be elucidated.