Boshart M, Weber F, Jahn G, Dorsch-Häsler K, Fleckenstein B, Schaffner W
Cell. 1985 Jun;41(2):521-30. doi: 10.1016/s0092-8674(85)80025-8.
A strong transcription enhancer was identified in the genomic DNA (235 kb) of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a ubiquitous and severe pathogen of the herpesvirus group. Cotransfection of enhancerless SV40 DNA with randomly fragmented HCMV DNA yielded two SV40-HCMV recombinant viruses that had incorporated overlapping segments of HCMV DNA to substitute for the missing SV40 enhancer. Within HCMV, these enhancer sequences are located upstream of the transcription initiation site of the major immediate-early gene, between nucleotides -118 and -524. Deletion studies with the HCMV enhancer, which harbors a variety of repeated sequence motifs, show that different subsets of this enhancer can substitute for the SV40 enhancer. The HCMV enhancer, which seems to have little cell type or species preference, is severalfold more active than the SV40 enhancer. It is the strongest enhancer we have analyzed so far, a property that makes it a useful component of eukaryotic expression vectors.
在人巨细胞病毒（HCMV，疱疹病毒组中一种普遍存在且致病性很强的病原体）的基因组DNA（235 kb）中鉴定出了一种强大的转录增强子。将无增强子的SV40 DNA与随机片段化的HCMV DNA共转染，产生了两种SV40 - HCMV重组病毒，它们整合了HCMV DNA的重叠片段来替代缺失的SV40增强子。在HCMV内，这些增强子序列位于主要立即早期基因转录起始位点的上游，在核苷酸-118和-524之间。对含有多种重复序列基序的HCMV增强子进行的缺失研究表明，该增强子的不同亚组可以替代SV40增强子。HCMV增强子似乎对细胞类型或物种没有明显偏好，其活性比SV40增强子高几倍。它是我们迄今为止分析过的最强的增强子，这一特性使其成为真核表达载体的有用组成部分。
