Type I Pharmacology, Hagedorn Research Institute, Gentofte, Denmark.
Diabetes-prone (DP) BB rats spontaneously develop insulin-dependent diabetes resembling human type 1 diabetes. They also exhibit lifelong T-cell lymphopenia. Functional and genetic data support the hypothesis that the gene responsible for the lymphopenia, Lyp, is also a diabetes susceptibility gene, named Iddm1. We constructed a 550-kb P1-derived artificial chromosome contig of the region. Here, we present a corrected genetic map reducing the genetic interval to 0.2 cM and the physical interval to 150-290 kb. A total of 13 genes and six GenomeScan models are assigned to the homologous human DNA segment on HSA7q36.1, 8 of which belong to the family of immune-associated nucleotides (Ian genes). Two of these are orthologous to mouse Ian1 and -4, both excellent candidates for Iddm1. In normal rats, they are expressed in the thymus and T-cell regions of the spleen. In the thymus of lymphopenic rats, Ian1 exhibits wild-type expression patterns, whereas Ian4 expression is reduced. Mutational screening of their coding sequences revealed a frameshift mutation in Ian4 among lymphopenic rats. The mutation results in a truncated protein in which the COOH-terminal 215 amino acids-including the anchor localizing the protein to the outer mitochondrial membrane-are replaced by 19 other amino acids. We propose that Ian4 is identical to Iddm1.