Figure 1.

Schematic representation of ER gene structure. The drawing is done according to Kos and colleagues (16) and White et al. (21). The position of the primers used successively for reverse transcription (primer I), PCR (nested downstream primer II, in association with the upstream primer P), and sequencing (nested primer III) are shown. The sequences of these primers are given in Materials and Methods. Structures of ERα-Δ2 KO (consisting in the deletion of exon 2, see ERαKO in ref. 18) and ERα-Neo KO [consisting of the introduction of a Neo insert in the site NotI (nucleotide 337) of exon 1, see αERKO in refs. 12 and 14] are also drawn.