Abstract
In this study we determined the activity of the rat luteinising hormone-beta gene promoter in a heterologous rat pituitary cell line (GH3 cells). 1.7 kb of LH-beta 5' flanking sequence and the first 5 bp of the 5' untranslated region were ligated to the chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) receptor gene (LH-beta-CAT) and transiently transfected by calcium phosphate precipitation into subconfluent cultures of GH3 cells. Basal low-level CAT activity was only detected in GH3 cells, being absent in two non-pituitary cell lines (BeWo and HeLa) RNase analysis revealed that mRNA from transfected GH3 cells protected a fragment of labelled antisense probe of correct size for transcription initiation from the LH-beta CAP site, confirming that promoter activity reflected correctly initiated LH-beta-CAT fusion gene transcripts. CAT activity was consistently induced by an average of 3-5-fold from the full-length 1.7 kb promoter, in a dose- and time-dependent manner, by forskolin, dibutyryl cAMP, and 8-bromo cAMP implying presence of a cAMP-responsive cis-acting domain in the LH-beta promoter region. Transfection of deletion mutants delta-615-CAT, delta-385-CAT and delta-250-CAT each reduced forskolin inducibility to 1.7-fold but did not ...Continue Reading