Architecture of the gel-forming mucins
Résumé
This review article focuses on the multi-domain
organization of the five human gel-forming mucins
MUC2, MUC5B, MUC5AC, MUC6 and MUC19. Gel-
forming mucins are O-glycoproteins with high
molecular mass that are secreted at the cell surface of
many secretory organs by specialized epithelial cells.
They form dimers through their carboxy-termini
regions and then multimers through their amino-
termini regions before being secreted into the lumen
of organs as long linear filaments. In addition, an
overview of their genomic organization is given and
we took the opportunity of this article to determine the
genomic organisation of the 5'-end region of MUC5AC. Finally, we discuss the
polymorphism of mucins and a few features of long messengers.