Solute Carrier Family 22 Member 9 (SLC22A9)

SLC22A9 is involved in the sodium-dependent transport and excretion of organic anions, some of which are potentially toxic. The encoded protein is an integral membrane protein and may be localized to the basolateral membrane. Five transcript variants encoding five different isoforms have been found for this gene.Using homology with rat Oat1 (SLC22A6), Sun et al. (2001) identified an EST for SLC22A9, which they designated OAT4. They obtained the full-length clone by screening liver and kidney cDNA libraries. The deduced protein contains 554 amino acids and is 55% identical to SLC22A10 . Northern blot analysis detected a 4.3-kb transcript expressed only in liver. Sun et al. (2001) noted that SLC22A9 is distinct from the SLC22A11 gene cloned by Cha et al. (2000), which has also been referred to as OAT4.