TY - JOUR
T1 - Characterization and genomic mapping of the ZNF80 locus
T2 - Expression of this zinc-finger gene is driven by a solitary LTR of ERV9 endogenous retrovrial family
AU - Di Cristofano, Antonio
AU - Strazzullo, Maria
AU - Longo, Letizia
AU - La mantia, Girolama
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Prof. L. Lania for useful discussions and critical reading of the manuscript. We would like also to thank Miss R. Terracciano for skilful technical help. This work was paid for by grants from European Community (EC Grant no. Gene-CTP3-0019), the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC) and from the AIDS program of the Istituto Superiore di Sank (Rome) and MURST to G.L.M.; M.S. is recipient of an AIRC fellowship.
PY - 1995/8/11
Y1 - 1995/8/11
N2 - ERV9 is a low repeated family of human endogenous retroviral elements, which has close to 50 members, in addition to at least 4000 solitary LTRs. Previous work has shown that randomly selected LTRs can promote transcription of reporter genes, raising the possibility that these sequences may affect the expression of adjacent cellular genes. We describe here the structure of the ZNF80 cDNA clone putatively coding for a zinc-finger protein, whose 5′ terminus starts from within an ERV9-LTR. Characterization of the single copy genomic locus indicates that a complete ERV9-LTR element is present upstream of the ZNF80 coding region and that this element acts as a functional promoter in both in vivo and in vitro experiments. A 2.6 kb long transcript is selectively expressed only in some hematopoletic cell lineages. Interestingly we mapped the ZNF80 locus to the 3q13.3 band, a region involved in karyotype rearrangements associated with myelocytic disorders. We have also analyzed the ZNF80 genomic organization In African green monkey and we show that this lower primate does not harbour an ERV9 element at this locus. Our findings strongly suggest that the expression of a zinc finger gene, which is highly conserved during evolution of primates, Is regulated in humans by an LTR element of the ERV9 family.
AB - ERV9 is a low repeated family of human endogenous retroviral elements, which has close to 50 members, in addition to at least 4000 solitary LTRs. Previous work has shown that randomly selected LTRs can promote transcription of reporter genes, raising the possibility that these sequences may affect the expression of adjacent cellular genes. We describe here the structure of the ZNF80 cDNA clone putatively coding for a zinc-finger protein, whose 5′ terminus starts from within an ERV9-LTR. Characterization of the single copy genomic locus indicates that a complete ERV9-LTR element is present upstream of the ZNF80 coding region and that this element acts as a functional promoter in both in vivo and in vitro experiments. A 2.6 kb long transcript is selectively expressed only in some hematopoletic cell lineages. Interestingly we mapped the ZNF80 locus to the 3q13.3 band, a region involved in karyotype rearrangements associated with myelocytic disorders. We have also analyzed the ZNF80 genomic organization In African green monkey and we show that this lower primate does not harbour an ERV9 element at this locus. Our findings strongly suggest that the expression of a zinc finger gene, which is highly conserved during evolution of primates, Is regulated in humans by an LTR element of the ERV9 family.
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U2 - 10.1093/nar/23.15.2823
DO - 10.1093/nar/23.15.2823
M3 - Article
C2 - 7659503
AN - SCOPUS:0029156092
SN - 0305-1048
VL - 23
SP - 2823
EP - 2830
JO - Nucleic acids research
JF - Nucleic acids research
IS - 15
ER -