Genomic organization of CD44 and the resulting exon 10–containing CD44 splice variants. (a) The genomic organization of CD44 and sizes of individual CD44 exons are shown. Specific functional domains of CD44, including the region of cartilage-link homology, the membrane-proximal variable domain with the “metastasis (meta)” epitope, the transmembrane region and the alternatively spliced cytoplasmic tails are indicated. (b) Schema for synthesis of exon 10–containing CD44 variable regions is shown. The positions of the sense oligonucleotides, FR1S and ex10S, and the antisense oligonucleotides, ex10AS and FR2AS, are indicated. (c) The resulting alternatively spliced exon 10–containing CD44 variants (CD44ex10, CD44ex10-14, CD44ex7-14) and CD44H are shown.