Figure 1.

(a) Illustration of the INK4/ARF locus on chromosome 9p21 encoding for the three tumor suppressors (TS) p14^ARF, p15INK4B, p16^INK4A and for the lncRNA ANRIL. ANRIL and p14 share a bidirectional promoter. The full length ANRIL transcript contains 19 exons. Black arrows on top represent different groups of truncated variants and the localization of primer assays is given by red bars. Black and white boxes at the bottom represent the exons of the three TS. Black boxes denote deletions as determined previously by Florl et al. [4], white boxes display retentions. (b) ANRIL expression across all kind of isoforms was determined in UC cell lines (left graph, bar chart) and tissues (right graph, boxplot representation) with the “all” assay by quantitative RT-PCR. Expression was normalized to the TBP reference gene. The cell lines comprised 13 UC cell lines (UCCs) and three normal controls (UCon), one immortalized normal cell line (TERT-NHUC) and two different primary cultures of normal uroepithelial cells (UEC). The tissue sample set 1 comprises 19 UC tissues (T) and 10 normal bladder tissues (N). In an analogous fashion, expression of full length variants (c), a group of 3’-truncated (d) and a group of 5’- truncated isoforms (e) was determined in the cell lines and tissues. (** p ≤ 0.01).