Premium
Characterization of the human TCAM1P pseudogene and its activation by a potential dual promoter–enhancer: Comparison with a protein‐coding mouse orthologue
Author(s) -
Kurihara Misuzu,
Kimura Atsushi P.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
febs letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.593
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1873-3468
pISSN - 0014-5793
DOI - 10.1016/j.febslet.2015.01.023
Subject(s) - pseudogene , enhancer , dual (grammatical number) , biology , genetics , computational biology , gene , transcription factor , genome , philosophy , linguistics
TCAM1P is a unitary pseudogene, which was disabled since the human–mouse divergence. Here we found that TCAM1P was specifically expressed in the human testis, with different cell type‐specificity from mouse Tcam1 , and characterized its transcripts. At the mouse locus, a multifunctional dual promoter–enhancer (DPE) controls the expression of Tcam1 and Smarcd2 genes. The corresponding human sequence was found to potentially function as a DPE, although the molecular mechanism was different from mouse. Interestingly, the change in DPE activity occurred before pseudogenization of TCAM1P . These data suggest the presence of a DPE in the human genome for the first time, and provide an important model of evolutionary changes in the regulatory mechanism of a pseudogene.