Vacuolar Protein Sorting 41 (VPS41)

Vesicle mediated protein sorting plays an important role in segregation of intracellular molecules into distinct organelles. VPS41 encodes the human ortholog of yeast Vps41 protein which is also conserved in Drosophila, tomato, and Arabidopsis. Expression studies in yeast and human indicate that this protein may be involved in the formation and fusion of transport vesicles from the Golgi. Several transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been described for this gene, however, the full-length nature of not all is known. The deduced 854-amino acid protein contains a C-terminal sequence highly conserved among the VPS41 homologs and also found in clathrin heavy chain. The non-yeast VPS41 homologs also have a RING-H2 motif. Northern blot analysis detected a 3.5-kb transcript equally expressed in all tissues tested.