An E box mediates activation and repression of the acetylcholine receptor delta-subunit gene during myogenesis.

The genes encoding the skeletal muscle acetylcholine receptor (AChR) are induced during muscle development and are regulated subsequently by innervation. Because both the initiation and the subsequent regulation of AChR expression are controlled by transcriptional mechanisms, an understanding of the steps that regulate AChR expression following innervation is likely to require knowledge of the pathway that activates AChR genes during myogenesis. Thus, we sought to identify the cis-acting sequences that regulate expression of the AChR delta-subunit gene during muscle differentiation. We transfected muscle and nonmuscle cell lines with gene fusions between 5'-flanking DNA from the AChR delta-subunit gene and the human growth hormone gene, and we show here that 148 bp of 5'-flanking DNA from the AChR delta-subunit gene contains two regulatory elements that control muscle-specific gene expression. One element is an E box, which is important both for activation of the delta-subunit gene in myotubes and for its repression in myoblasts and nonmuscle cells. Mutation of this E box, which prevents binding of MyoD-E2A and myogenin-E2A heterodimers, decreases expression in myotubes and increases expression in myoblasts and nonmuscle cells. An E-box binding activity, which does not contain MyoD, myogenin, or E2A proteins, is present in muscle and nonmuscle cells and may be responsible for repressing the delta-subunit gene in myoblasts and nonmuscle cells. An enhancer, which lacks E boxes, is also required for expression of the delta-subunit gene but does not confer muscle-specific expression.