Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and the less severe Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD) are human X-linked muscle-wasting disorders that have been localized to the band Xp21 by genetic linkage analysis^1–9 and cytologically detectable abnormalities^10–12. A cloned DNA segment, DXS164 (or pERT87), has been shown to detect deletions in the DNA of unrelated DMD and BMD males^13–15. Here we present the nucleotide sequence of two highly conserved DNA fragments from the DXS164 locus and their homologous sequences from the mouse X chromosome. One of the human conserved segments hybridized to a large transcript in RNA isolated from human fetal skeletal muscle and was used to isolate cDNA clones which cover approximately 10% of this transcript. The cDNA clones map to Xp21 and hybridize with a minimum of eight small regions that span 130 kilobases (kb) of the DXS164 locus. These expressed sequences are candidates for portions of the gene responsible for both DMD and BMD.