We report the identification of a splice variant of SorCS, a member of the family of VPS10 domain containing receptors. These type I transmembrane proteins share the presence of internalization signals in their cytoplasmic tail as one common characteristic. We show that an alternatively spliced transcript of SorCS is generated by differential processing of a composite internal/terminal exon. This splice variant encodes a protein with an N-terminal VPS10 domain followed by a leucine-rich module and a transmembrane domain identical with the already described SorCS protein, but a divergent cytoplasmic tail. In contrast to the known intracellular regions of the related receptors, this splice variant contains no internalization or sorting signals.
