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J. Biol. Chem., Vol. 283, Issue 45, 30997-31004, November 7, 2008

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Novel Variants of Oct-3/4 Gene Expressed in Mouse Somatic Cells^*

Nobuhiko Mizuno and Mitsuko Kosaka¹

From the Research Unit for Cell Plasticity, Riken Center for Developmental Biology, Chuo-ku, Kobe 650-0047, Japan and the Okayama University Graduate School of Medicine, Dentistry, and Pharmaceutical Sciences, 2-5-1, Shikata-cho, Okayama City, Okayama 700-8558, Japan

It has been suggested that Oct-3/4 may regulate self-renewal in somatic stem cells, as it does in embryonic stem cells. However, recent reports raise the possibility that detection of human Oct-3/4 expression by RT-PCR is prone to artifacts generated by pseudogene transcripts and argue against a role for Oct-3/4 in somatic cells. In this study, we clarified Oct-3/4 expression in mouse somatic tissues using designed PCR primers, which can exclude amplification of its pseudogenes. We found that novel alternative transcripts are indeed expressed in somatic tissues, rather than the normal length transcripts in germline and ES cells. The alternative transcripts indicate the expression of two kinds of truncated proteins. Furthermore, we determined novel promoter regions that are sufficient for the expression of Oct-3/4 transcript variants in somatic cells. These findings provide new insights into the postnatal role of Oct-3/4 in somatic tissues.

Received for publication, April 18, 2008 , and in revised form, September 2, 2008.

^* This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid to the Leading Project and 19592048 (to M. K.) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

The on-line version of this article (available at http://www.jbc.org) contains supplemental Figs. S1-S4.

¹ To whom correspondence should be addressed. Fax: 81-86-222-5059; E-mail: m-kosaka{at}md.okayama-u.ac.jp.

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