Regulated Expression of α-Fetoprotein Genes in Transgenic Mice
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
Eukaryotic organisms have evolved multiple ways in which to generate variation in the tissue-specific expression of cellular genes. In some instances, gene duplication followed by divergence of the regulatory sequences has been used to accomplish this, as best typified by the actin gene families from sea urchins (Angerer and Davidson 1984) to humans (Gunning et al. 1983). Alternative splicing of the primary transcripts of a single-copy gene in the calcitonin gene (Rosenfeld et al. 1984) and tissue-specific use of duplicated promoters in the mouse α-amylase gene (Schibler et al. 1983) represent ways in which diversity is built into single-copy genes.
None of these mechanisms can be invoked to explain the diverse pattern of expression of the murine α-fetoprotein (AFP) and albumin genes. These genes, which arose as the products of a gene duplication 500 million years ago (Kioussis et al. 1981), form a small multigene family on chromosome 5 of...
