TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hickey, Scott F.
A1  - Sridhar, Malathy
A1  - Westermann, Alexander J.
A1  - Qin, Qian
A1  - Vijayendra, Pooja
A1  - Liou, Geoffrey
A1  - Hammond, Ming C.
T1  - Transgene regulation in plants by alternative splicing of a suicide exon
JF  - Nucleic Acids Research
N2  - Compared to transcriptional activation, other mechanisms of gene regulation have not been widely exploited for the control of transgenes. One barrier to the general use and application of alternative splicing is that splicing-regulated transgenes have not been shown to be reliably and simply designed. Here, we demonstrate that a cassette bearing a suicide exon can be inserted into a variety of open reading frames (ORFs), generating transgenes whose expression is activated by exon skipping in response to a specific protein inducer. The surprisingly minimal sequence requirements for the maintenance of splicing fidelity and regulation indicate that this splicing cassette can be used to regulate any ORF containing one of the amino acids Glu, Gln or Lys. Furthermore, a single copy of the splicing cassette was optimized by rational design to confer robust gene activation with no background expression in plants. Thus, conditional splicing has the potential to be generally useful for transgene regulation.
KW  - kingdom
KW  - pre-messenger RNA
KW  - gene expression
KW  - elements
KW  - decay
KW  - arabidopsis
KW  - eukaryotes
KW  - mechanisms
Y1  - 2012
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-134724
VL  - 40
IS  - 10
ER  -