Aberrant splicing of rat steroid 17 alpha-hydroxylase transcripts.

Polymerase chain reaction amplification of the cDNA encoding steroid 17 alpha-hydroxylase (P450c17) demonstrated very low levels of this transcript and a shorter variant of still lower abundance in rat adrenals and brain. Sequence analysis of the two amplified products revealed that the shorter variant resulted from a deletion of the second exon which does not maintain the open reading frame, suggesting that faulty splicing gave rise to this minor species.