Isolation and In vitro Validation of Cardiac Muscle-Specific Promoters in Pigs

Identification of promoter sequences that can drive heart-specific expression of transgenes is essential to investigate gene function in the heart. The aim of this study was to identify heart-specific genes and their promoter sequences that can promote heart-specific transgene expression in pig primary heart cells. Gene expression profiles in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository have been integrated and utilized to identify MYH6, TNNI3, and MYBPC3 as common heart-specific genes in the mouse and human. RT-PCR further confirmed heartspecific expression of the genes among various tissues in pigs as well as in mice and humans. Bioinformatics analysis predicted that their promoter sequences contain multiple binding sites for transcription factors involved in cardiogenesis and the promoter sequences were substantially conserved between pigs and humans. In addition, in vitro analysis showed that expression of (i.e., the green fluorescence protein (GFP)) reporter gene under the regulation of promoter sequences of MYH6, TNNI3, and MYBPC3 was detected in primary pig heart cells but not in other primary cells. These findings, along with the physiologic similarities between humans and pigs, suggest that these novel promoters may be valuable candidates for the regulation of heart gene expression in both humans and pigs for biomedical purposes. *Corresponding authors: Seongsoo Hwang, Animal Biotechnology Division, National Institute of Animal Science, Republic of Korea, Tel: +82-63-238-7253; Fax: +82-63-238-7297; E-mail: [email protected] Kichoon Lee, Department of Animal Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA, Tel: 614-688-7963; Fax: 614-292-2929; E-mail: [email protected] Received April 23, 2016; Accepted May 10, 2016; Published May 15, 2016 Citation: Shin S, Ahn J, Suh Y, Moeller SJ, Hwang S, et al. (2016) Isolation and In vitro Validation of Cardiac Muscle-Specific Promoters in Pigs. Cell Mol Biol 62: 123. doi: 10.4172/1165-158X.1000123 Copyright: © 2016 Shin S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.