MAX Like Protein X (MLX)

MLX belongs to the family of basic helix-loop-helix leucine zipper (bHLH-Zip) transcription factors. These factors form heterodimers with Mad proteins and play a role in proliferation, determination and differentiation. This gene product may act to diversify Mad family function by its restricted association with a subset of the Mad family of transcriptional repressors, namely, Mad1 and Mad4. Alternatively spliced transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been identified for this gene.The predicted amino acid sequence of MLX is conserved at all positions that define the bHLH-ZIP class of transcription factors and is most similar to that of MAX, sharing approximately 50% identity in the bHLH-ZIP domains. The 244-amino acid human and mouse MLX proteins differ at only 4 amino acid positions.