We recently reported the isolation and sequencing of human cDNA clones corresponding to the alpha 3 chain of type VI collagen (Chu, M.-L., Zhang, R.-Z., Pan, T.-c., Stokes, D., Conway, D., Kuo, H.-J., Glanville, R., Mayer, U., Mann, K., Deutzmann, R., and Timpl, R. (1990) EMBO J. 9, 385-393). The study indicates that the amino-terminal globular domain of the alpha 3(VI) chain consists of nine repetitive subdomains of approximately 200 amino acid residues (N1-N9) and the gene appeared to undergo alternative splicing since some clones lacked regions encoding the N9 and part of the N3 subdomains. In the present study, we report the exon structure for the region encoding the amino-terminal globular domain of the human alpha 3(VI) chain. The nine repetitive subdomains are encoded by 10 exons spanning 26 kilobase pairs of genomic DNA. Eight of the repetitive subdomains (N2-N9) were found to be encoded by separate exons of approximately 600 base pairs each. The only exception is the N1 subdomain which is encoded by two exons of 417 and 146 base pairs. Characterization of the exon/intron structure showed that the cDNA variants were the result of splicing out of exon 9 (encoding the N9 subdomain) and part of exon 3 (encoding the N3 subdomain). Nuclease S1 analysis and the polymerase chain reaction demonstrated that exon 7 (N7 subdomain) was also subject to alternative splicing in normal skin fibroblasts. Examination of these splicing events by nuclease S1 analysis in normal fibroblasts, three different human tumor cell lines, and several human tissues showed that splicing out of exon 9 is much more efficient in normal as compared to tumor cells.