Proton Coupled Amino Acid Transporter 3 (PAT3)

The deduced 470-amino acid protein contains putative N-glycosylation sites and 3 histidine residues critical for proton binding. Although SLC36A1 and SLC36A2 have 11 transmembrane domains, SLC36A3 shows a weaker hydrophobicity profile for the region corresponding to transmembrane domain 8 and may therefore contain only 10 transmembrane domains. The authors predicted that the N terminus of SLC36A3 is intracellular and that the C terminus may be extracellular or, in the case of a lysosomal location, intralysosomal.

SLC36A3 shares 83% amino acid similarity with mouse Slc36a3. RT-PCR detected expression of mouse Slc36a3 exclusively in adult testis