. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2016 Oct 15.

Published in final edited form as: J Immunol. 2015 Sep 4;195(8):3992–4000. doi: 10.4049/jimmunol.1501426

Table I.

Light chain genes in the nurse shark

L chain gene^a	Number	Organization	Subtypes^a
Kappa (NS4)	~39	GL-joined	6 clusters: VkR4, VkR7, VkR18, VkRE18; psVkR6^b, psVkR19^b, [VkR20]
		Split	33 clusters: ≤ 63% functional^c
Lambda (NS3)	6	GL-joined	5 clusters: NS3-12, −23, −46, −17^b, −56A^b
		GL-joined	1 cluster: NS3-8
Sigma-2 (NS5)	4	GL-joined	1 cluster: NS5-16
		Split	3 clusters: NS5-2, −48, −37^b
Sigma	2	Split	2 clusters
All L chains	~51	GL-joined	13 clusters: 9 functional (4 kappa)
		Split	~38 clusters: ~25 functional (21 kappa)

Six GL-joined kappa genes were described in ref. 26 (called R4, R7, R18, RE18, R6, R19), allelic relationship unknown. VkR20 was recently isolated (A. Lui and E. Hsu, unpub. results). Other germline L chain genes were reported in refs. 22, 38, 51. Their earlier names are in parentheses. The subtypes differ from each other either by organization (GL-joined or split) or sequence (NS3-8 and NS3-12 are different by 33% in V and 23% in C).

Pseudogene

Of 24 unique split VL genes isolated from shark-Y bacteriophage and BAC libraries, nine genes had defective VL gene segments.