FIGURE 6.

The 3′UTR of mammalian TH mRNA is highly conserved and contains three putative stem–loop structures. (A) Sequence alignment of the 3′UTR of TH mRNAs from three mammalian species shows a high degree of sequence conservation. The red and blue letters represent nucleotides conserved among all three and in two out of the three species, respectively. Green, blue, or yellow highlighted regions correspond to the sequences of the three putative stem–loop structures. (B) Structure of the TH 3′UTR, as determined by secondary structure prediction analysis (Mfold) (Zuker 2003). Yellow denotes a hairpin stem–loop (50 nt), which is highly conserved. (C) Schematic of plasmid constructs used to transfect SCG neurons. The control plasmid was used unmodified as acquired from Clontech and contains a SV403′UTR. In the Full 3′UTR [1–262 bp] plasmid construct, the full-length 3′UTR of TH was inserted following the tdTomato ORF.