IGF Like Family, Member 4 (IGFL4)

IGFL4 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.

IGFL4 encodes a deduced 106-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.