A simple and sensitive method for determining transcription initiation site: identification of two transcription initiation sites in rat group II phospholipase A2 gene.

We developed a simple and sensitive method for assigning transcriptional initiation sites, and applied it to characterize the transcriptional unit of rat group II phospholipase A2 (PLA2) gene. Our method involves the primer extension reaction followed by detection of its products by hybridization. Using this method, we were able to map two transcriptional initiation sites on the nucleotide sequence of the core promoter region of PLA2 gene with one-base resolution without any difficulties.