Tissue-specific and developmentally regulated alternative splicing of a visceral isoform of smooth muscle myosin heavy chain.

Previous work demonstrated that the rabbit smooth muscle myosin heavy chain gene showed sequence divergence at the 25kDa/50kDa junction of the S1 subfragment when compared to chicken gizzard and chicken epithelial nonmuscle myosin. RNase protection analysis with a probe spanning this region detected two partially protected fragments which were not present in RNA from vascular tissue and only found in RNA from visceral tissue. The polymerase chain reaction was used to amplify a 162bp product from primers spanning the putative region of divergence and DNA sequence analysis revealed a seven amino acid insertion not previously detected in other characterised cDNA clones. RNase protection analysis using the PCR product as probe showed that the inserted sequence was expressed exclusively in RNA from visceral tissue. Similar RNA analysis showed that the visceral isoform was not expressed in 20 day fetal rabbit smooth muscle tissues. These results indicated that the new visceral isoform was expressed in a tissue-specific and developmentally regulated manner. Genomic DNA sequencing and mapping of the exon-intron boundaries showed that the visceral isoform was the product of cassette-type alternative splicing. The inclusion of a visceral-specific sequence near the Mg-ATPase domain and at the 25kDa/50kDa junction suggests that the visceral isoform may be important for myosin function in smooth muscle cells.