In the salvage pathway of GDP-L-fucose, free cytosolic fucose is phosphorylated by L-fucokinase to form L-fu-cose-1-phosphate, which is then further converted to GDP-L-fucose in the reaction catalyzed by GDP-L-fucose pyrophosphorylase. We report here the cloning and expression of murine L-fucokinase and GDP-L-fucose pyrophosphorylase. MurineL-fucokinase is expressed as two transcripts of 3057 and 3270 base pairs, encoding proteins of 1019 and 1090 amino acids with predicted molecular masses of 111 kDa and 120 kDa respectively. Only the longer splice variant ofL-fucokinase was enzy-matically active when expressed in COS-7 cells
