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. 1993 Dec 15;296(Pt 3):595–600. doi: 10.1042/bj2960595

Production of rat soluble and membrane-bound catechol O-methyltransferase forms from bifunctional mRNAs.

J Tenhunen 1, I Ulmanen 1
PMCID: PMC1137739  PMID: 8280056

Abstract

In the rat, the catechol O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene has been found to contain two promoters, P1 and P2. This organization enables the gene to produce a soluble (S-COMT) and a membrane-associated (MB-COMT) protein by using two in-frame ATG initiation codons (S- and MB-ATG). The P1 promoter expresses a 1.6 kb transcript (S-mRNA) which codes for the S-COMT polypeptide only. Here we demonstrate that the P2 promoter controls the expression of alternatively spliced 1.9 kb transcripts (MB-mRNA) which differ by a 27-nucleotide region immediately upstream of the MB-AUG codon. The presence of the 27-base sequence alters the nucleotide at position -3 from G to C, thereby changing the translation initiation context of the MB-AUG codon. Expression experiments in COS-7 cells using full-length COMT cDNAs showed that this alteration affected the initiation of the translation of the MB-AUG and consequently changed the relative amounts of MB- and S-COMT polypeptides produced. No proteolytic cleavage of the MB-COMT form to S-COMT was detected in in vitro or in vivo pulse-chase experiments. We conclude that the bifunctional 1.9 kb mRNAs are able to produce both S-COMT and MB-COMT polypeptide by the leaky scanning mechanism of translation initiation.

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Selected References

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