For more than 50 years the serotonin system has been the subject of intense research. This has provided an exciting insight and led to the discovery of multiple drugs targeting serotonin receptors, metabolising enzymes and re-uptake sites. During the past few years researchers focussed especially on elucidating the complexity of different physiological actions in the serotonergic network. We have identified two novel human serotonin 5-hydroxytryptamine type 3 receptor-like genes, HTR3D and HTR3E, by performing homology searches using the public human sequence databases and subsequently cloned the full length cDNAs by 5' and 3' rapid amplification of complementary DNA ends. Mapping of HTR3D and HTR3E by hybridisation, polymerase chain reaction and fluorescence in situ hybridisation revealed that both genes together with HTR3C are clustered in a subinterval of less than 100 kb on chromosome 3q27. Comparative expression analysis of all HTR3 genes, namely HTR3A, B, C, D and E showed HTR3D expression to be restricted to kidney, colon and liver and HTR3E expression to colon and intestine, whereas all other genes are widely expressed in many tissues including brain.