Expression of a splicing variant in the 5'-UTR of the human ERCC1 gene is not cancer related.

Cisplatin is the most commonly used chemotherapeutic agent in the treatment of ovarian cancer. One of the mechanisms of resistance of ovarian tumours to cisplatin is increased nucleotide excision repair activity, in particular increased levels of the endonuclease ERCC1. Since 30-40% of ovarian cancers develop resistance to cisplatin after treatment and these tumours are usually incurable, ERCC1 expression is potentially useful as a predictive marker for the effectiveness of cisplatin-based chemotherapy. Using RT-PCR and Northern blotting, we have examined the expression of a 42 bp differentially spliced sequence in exon 1 of the human ERCC1 gene, loss of which has previously been reported to be correlated with higher levels of ERCC1 mRNA in ovarian cancer cell lines. We report here that this alternate transcript is ubiquitous in human tissues and cancer cell lines, is absent in mouse and thus does not appear to be cancer related.