Hoffmann, R. A wiki for the life sciences where authorship matters. Nature Genetics (2008)

Editor

Personal info

View

About

Terms

Javascript disabled

Please enable Javascript support in your browser to use this application.

Instructions on how to enable JavaScript on different browsers can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23852.

[edit this page]

Debailleul, V. et al.

Human mucin genes MUC2, MUC3, MUC4, MUC5AC, MUC5B, and MUC6 express stable and extremely large mRNAs and exhibit a variable length polymorphism. An improved method to analyze large mRNAs.

Of the nine mucin genes that have been characterized, only MUC1 and MUC7 have been fully sequenced, and their transcripts can be detected as distinct bands of predicted size by Northern blot analysis. In contrast, the RNA patterns observed for each of the other MUC genes have usually shown a very high degree of polydispersity. This polydispersity has been believed to be one of the typical features of the mucin mRNAs, but until now, its origin has remained unexplained. In the work described in the present paper, we investigated two possible kinds of explanation for this phenomenon: namely that the extensive polydispersity results from a biological mechanism or that it is artifactual in origin. The data obtained, as a result of improving the purification and blotting methods, allowed us to show that in all of the tissues analyzed, each of the genes, MUC2-6, expresses mRNAs that are stable and are of an unusually large size to be found in eukaryotes (14-24 kilobases). Moreover, allelic variations in length of these mucin transcripts were observed. We demonstrate that these variations are directly related to the variable number of tandem repeat polymorphisms seen at the DNA level.[1]

References

Human mucin genes MUC2, MUC3, MUC4, MUC5AC, MUC5B, and MUC6 express stable and extremely large mRNAs and exhibit a variable length polymorphism. An improved method to analyze large mRNAs. Debailleul, V., Laine, A., Huet, G., Mathon, P., d'Hooghe, M.C., Aubert, J.P., Porchet, N. J. Biol. Chem. (1998) [Pubmed]

Annotations and hyperlinks in this abstract are from individual authors of WikiGenes or automatically generated by the WikiGenes Data Mining Engine. The abstract is from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.About WikiGenes Open Access Licence Privacy Policy Terms of Use apsburg

The world's first wiki where authorship really matters (Nature Genetics, 2008). Due credit and reputation for authors. Imagine a global collaborative knowledge base for original thoughts. Search thousands of articles and collaborate with scientists around the globe.