Technology and Development Team for Mammalian Cellular Dynamics, BioResource Center, RIKEN Tsukuba Institute, Ibaraki, 305-0074, Japan.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2011 Apr;39(7):2649-57. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkq1201. Epub 2010 Dec 3.
We investigated the allele- and strand-specific transcriptional landscape of a megabase-wide genomic region of mouse Ube3a (ubiquitin protein ligase E3A) by means of a highly parallel SNP genotyping platform. We have successfully identified maternal-specific expression of Ube3a and its antisense counterpart (Ube3a-ATS) in brain, but not in liver. Because of the use of inter-subspecies hybrid mice, this megabase-wide analysis provided high-resolution picture of the transcriptional patterns of this region. First, we showed that brain-specific maternal expression of Ube3a is restricted to the second half part of the locus, but is absent from the first half part. Balance of allelic expression is altered in the middle of the locus. Second, we showed that expression of the brain-specific Ube3a-ATS appeared to be terminated in the region upstream to the Ube3a transcription start site. The present study highlights the importance of locus-wide competition between sense and antisense transcripts.
我们利用高通量 SNP 基因分型平台研究了小鼠 Ube3a（泛素蛋白连接酶 E3A）大片段基因组区域的等位基因和链特异性转录谱。我们已经成功地在大脑中鉴定出 Ube3a 及其反义基因（Ube3a-ATS）的母系特异性表达，而在肝脏中则没有。由于使用了种间杂交小鼠，因此这项大片段分析提供了该区域转录模式的高分辨率图像。首先，我们表明 Ube3a 的大脑特异性母系表达仅限于基因座的后半部分，但不存在于前半部分。基因座中部的等位基因表达平衡发生改变。其次，我们表明，大脑特异性 Ube3a-ATS 的表达似乎在 Ube3a 转录起始位点上游的区域终止。本研究强调了正义和反义转录本之间全基因座竞争的重要性。
