The complete coding sequence of a BDIX rat gene homo-logous to the human ABO gene was determined. Identifi-cation of the exon–intron boundaries, obtained by comparison of the coding sequence with rat genomic sequences from data banks, revealed that the rat gene structure is identical to that of the human ABO gene. It localizes to rat chromosome 3 (q11-q12), a region homolo-gous to human 9q34.