A conserved 28-base-pair element (HF-1) in the rat cardiac myosin light-chain-2 gene confers cardiac-specific and alpha-adrenergic-inducible expression in cultured neonatal rat myocardial cells.

To study the transcriptional regulatory mechanisms which mediate cardiac-specific and inducible expression during myocardial cell hypertrophy, we have extensively characterized the rat cardiac myosin light-chain-2 (MLC-2) gene as a model system. The MLC-2 gene encodes a relatively abundant contractile protein in slow skeletal and cardiac muscle and is upregulated during in vivo cardiac hypertrophy and alpha-adrenergic-mediated hypertrophy of neonatal rat myocardial cells. In transient expression assays employing a series of MLC-2-luciferase constructs, recent studies have identified a 250-bp fragment which is sufficient for both cardiac-specific and alpha-adrenergic-inducible expression. Within this 250-bp fragment lie three regions (HF-1, HF-2, and HF-3), each greater than 10 bp in length, which are conserved between the chicken and rat cardiac MLC-2 genes, suggesting their potential role in the regulated expression of this contractile protein gene. As assessed by substitution mutations within each of the conserved regions, the present study demonstrates that HF-1 and HF-2 are important in both cardiac-specific and inducible expression, while HF-3 has no detectable role in the regulated expression of the MLC-2 gene in transient expression assays. HF-1 sequences confer both cardiac-specific and inducible expression to a neutral promoter-luciferase construct but have no significant effect in the skeletal muscle or nonmuscle cell contexts. Thus, these studies have identified a new cardiac-specific regulatory element (HF-1) which plays a role in both cardiac-specific and inducible expression during myocardial cell hypertrophy.