Abstract
Crystallins are a group of soluble proteins specific to vertebrate lenses, and have been used successfully as molecular markers for studying lens differentiation. The synthesis and accumulation of δ-crystaIlin in the differentiating lens cells of chick, in particular, have been extensively studied (for review see refs 1–3). Recently, we have cloned a continuous stretch of a chick δ-crystallin gene which is specifically expressed in lens cells4. We have injected this gene into nuclei of various mouse somatic cells. δ-Crystallin is totally absent from mammalian lenses in which it is replaced by γ-crystallin, thus this xenogeneic injection system should allow us to study tissue-specific gene expression. We report here experiments which demonstrate that (1) the cloned δ-crystallin gene of chick is expressed in the mouse lens epithelial cells as efficiently as in the homologous chick cells; (2) δ-crystallin synthesized in the mouse lens epithelium has the native molecular weight, indicating correct splicing of the gene transcripts; (3) the expression is inefficient in the non-lens tissues examined, suggesting lens-specific expression of the δ-crystallin gene in the xenogeneic environment. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that a cloned gene shows preferential expression in homologous cell types of different species.
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Kondoh, H., Yasuda, K. & Okada, T. Tissue-specific expression of a cloned chick δ-crystallin gene in mouse cells. Nature 301, 440–442 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1038/301440a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/301440a0
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