The 5'-flanking region of the human dopamine beta-hydroxylase gene promotes neuron subtype-specific gene expression in the central nervous system of transgenic mice.

Dopamine beta-hydroxylase (DBH, EC 1.14.17.1) catalyzes the conversion of dopamine to norepinephrine, the third step of catecholamine biosynthesis. We have previously created transgenic mice harboring a chimeric gene consisting of the 4-kb DNA fragment of the human DBH gene promoter and the human phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase (PNMT, EC 2.1.1.28) cDNA, to express PNMT in norepinephrine- and epinephrine-producing cells in the brain, sympathetic ganglia, and adrenal medullary chromaffin cells (Kobayashi et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 89 (1992) 1631-1635). In this paper, we produced for the first time the antibody that specifically detects human PNMT, but not mouse PNMT, with the synthetic oligopeptide characteristic of the human PNMT sequence, and used this antibody to investigate the cells expressing human PNMT in transgenic mice. Immunohistochemical analysis of transgenic mice showed typical expression of human PNMT immunoreactivity in norepinephrinergic and epinephrinergic neurons in brain, as well as norepinephrine- and epinephrine-producing cells in the adrenal gland, indicating that the 4-kb 5'-flanking region is essential for the tissue-specific expression of the DBH gene. We also detected the ectopic expression in some DBH-immunonegative cells in the olfactory bulb of transgenic mice.