IGF Like Family, Member 3 (IGFL3)

IGFL3 belongs to the insulin-like growth factor (IGF) family of signaling molecules that play critical roles in cellular energy metabolism and in growth and development, especially prenatal growth.By EST database analysis and DNA sequence assembly, Emtage et al. (2006) identified 4 members of a human gene family, which they designated IGF-like (IGFL), encoding small secreted proteins. IGFL3 encodes a deduced 102-amino acid protein with a signal peptide followed by a conserved region with 11 regularly spaced cysteine residues, including 2 CC motifs. Real-time PCR of several human tissues detected IGFL3 only in cerebellum. Emtage et al. (2006) identified only 1 Igfl sequence in mouse, which cannot be assigned direct orthology with any of the human IGFL sequences.