Isolation and Characterization of UV-inducible gene in Eukaryotic cells

The present study intends to characterize the DNA damage-inducible responses in eukaryotic cells. The fission yeast, S. pombe, which displays efficient DNA repair systems, was used in this study as a model system for higher eukaryotes. To study UV-inducible responses in S. pombe, five UV-inducible cDNA clones were isolated from S. pombe by using subtration hybridization method. To investigate the expression of isolated genes, the cellular levels of the transcripts of these genes were determined by Northern blot analysis after UV-irradiation. The transcripts of isolated gene (UV130) increased rapidly and reached maximum accumulation after UV-irradiation. Compared to the message levels of control, the levels of maximal increase were approximately 5 fold to UV-irradiation. In order to investigation whether the increase of UV130 transcripts was a specific results of UV-irradiation, UV130 transcript levels were examined after treating the cells to Methylmethane sulfonate (MMS). The transcripts of UV130 were not induced by treatment of 0.25% MMS. These results implied that the effects of damaging agents are complex and different regulatory pathways exist for the induction of these genes. To characterize the structure of UV130 gene, nucleotide sequences were analyzed. The nucleotide sequence of 1,340 nucleotide excluding poly(A) tail contains one open reading frame, which encodes a protein of 270 amino acids. The predicted amino acid sequences of UV130 do not exhibit any significant similarity to ther known sequences in the database.