Horse Ig kappa genes have been characterized to determine whether there may be a structural basis for the low level of kappa expression in this species. The overall organization of the J kappa-C kappa locus is remarkably similar to that of the mouse and human loci. A single C kappa exon is separated by 2.9 kb from five J kappa segments, four of which seem functional and three of which are associated with canonical recombination signal sequences. A highly conserved intron enhancer was identified upstream of the C kappa exon and a single restriction fragment in horse genomic DNA hybridized strongly with the mouse downstream kappa enhancer. Germ-line and splenic cDNA V kappa sequences were characterized and found to encode N-terminal amino acid sequences previously found by protein sequencing. Hybridization of horse genomic DNA with the horse V kappa-1 germ-line gene and a variety of mouse V kappa-region probes provided evidence for at least 20 V kappa gene segments. The results indicate that the horse possesses a functional kappa locus with a complement of variable region gene segments potentially as large as that previously found at the lambda locus although the exact numbers of functional variable region genes remains to be established for both loci. This finding suggests that the predominance of lambda-chains in horse Ig may not be simply a result of a lack of functional kappa genes or of a disproportionate number of lambda vs kappa variable region genes. The results are discussed in terms of various models of isotype regulation.