Classical phenomenological approaches to the study of the mechanism of T-cell-mediated cytotoxicity have now given way to a search for molecules involved in this function; this is attempted either by subcellular and biochemical fractionation of material from cytotoxic cells, or through the characterization of molecules recognized by cytotoxicity-inhibiting monoclonal antibodies Molecules having a role in cytotoxicity may also be identified by detecting the corresponding messenger RNA transcripts. Such an approach may include, as a first step, the search for transcripts as specific as possible to cytotoxic T cells; only secondarily can their actual relevance to cytotoxicity be investigated. We report here the preparation and systematic screening of a differential complementary DNA bank, in which we detected three distinct messenger RNA transcripts (CTLA-1, CTLA-2 and CTLA-3) present in various cytotoxic T cells but not (or less so) in a range of non-cytotoxic lymphoid cells. We describe the co-inducibility of these transcripts and of cytotoxicity in thymocytes and hybridoma cells, the sequence of CTLA-1 cDNA, its protein homology with serine esterases and the localization of the corresponding gene to mouse chromosome 14.