Insulin-like growth factors (IGFs) are polypeptide hormones with structural homology to proinsulin. IGFs circulate in blood bound to specific IGF binding proteins (IGFBPs). cDNA sequences of six members of a family of human and rat IGFBPs have been published. Here we present a partial characterization of the human IGFBP-2 gene. This single copy gene is located on chromosome 2 and spans a total of more than 32 kilobases (kb) of genomic sequence. It is organized in four exons with sizes of more than 568, 220, 141, and 496 nucleotides. The intron between exon one and exon two contributes 27 kb to the size of the IGFBP-2 gene. The second and the third introns comprise 1.1 kb and 1.95 kb, respectively. When the structure of the IGFBP-2 gene is compared to that of the IGFBP-1 and IGFBP-3 genes, the exon boundaries are found to be conserved in these three genes. A single transcriptional start site was localized to 113 +/- 2 nucleotides 5' of the ATG start codon of IGFBP-2 translation. Furthermore, the region between nucleotides -635 and -2 upstream of the ATG was demonstrated to exhibit promoter activity in human Jurkat K16 cells. This region is devoid of TATA or CAAT consensus sequence motifs and has a high content of dC and dG nucleotides. In this respect the putative IGFBP-2 promoter region resembles the promoters which are often associated with housekeeping genes.