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Transgene regulation in plants by alternative splicing of a suicide exon
Author(s) -
Hammond Ming Chen,
Hickey Scott F,
Sridhar Malathy,
Westermann Alexander,
Qin Qian,
Vijayendra Pooja,
Liou Geoffrey
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.26.1_supplement.941.3
Subject(s) - exon , rna splicing , alternative splicing , transgene , biology , exonic splicing enhancer , trans splicing , genetics , exon skipping , gene , microbiology and biotechnology , computational biology , rna
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.