Muscle-enriched TEF-1 isoforms bind M-CAT elements from muscle-specific promoters and differentially activate transcription.

M-CAT elements mediate cardiac- and embryonic skeletal muscle-specific expression of the cardiac troponin T gene and a number of other cardiac-specific genes. M-CAT binding factor was shown to be related to cloned human TEF-1, a transcriptional regulator of the SV40 viral enhancer. Here we describe the cloning of TEF-1 from chick heart and the identification of several novel isoforms. We show that TEF-1 mRNA is considerably enriched in cardiac and skeletal muscle, consistent with a proposed role in muscle gene transcription. The predominant TEF-1 isoforms, TEF-1A and a novel isoform TEF-1B, bind M-CAT elements with high affinity and in a sequence-specific manner. We further demonstrate that the C-terminal portion of TEF-1B, which contains the 13-amino acid exon that distinguishes this isoform, can activate transcription when linked to a heterologous DNA binding domain, while the same domain of TEF-1A cannot. Therefore, isoforms of TEF-1 may play different roles in the regulation of M-CAT-dependent promoters in striated muscle cells.