• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.681-687
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• 2011

Bioorgan transgenic cloned mini pig has a problem of growth retardation in uterus during end of pregnancy so that survival rate is very low in newborn piglet. In order to support their life after birth, cesarean section of fetus with sufficient growth in uterus was tested in this study. First of all, fetus growth measured using a ultrasound scanner during pregnancy in transgenic mini pig, comparing normal pig. After 113 days for delivering, fetus was removed out of uterus. Fetus growth for normal pig was 1.8 cm at 4weeks and 14.4 cm at end of pregnancy (15 weeks). At 113 days, fetus growth was $15.9{\pm}4$ cm in ultrasound scanner and real growth measurement from fetus removal out of uterus was $16.0{\pm}2$ cm. It is very a similar result between measurement of ultrasound scanner and real measurement. Therefore, using ultrasound scanner for measuring fetus growth will be useful to predict fetus growth in uterus.

• Reproductive and Developmental Biology
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.207-212
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• 2012

The shortage of human organs for transplantation has induced the research on the possibility of using animal as porcine. However, pig to human transplantation as known as xeno-transplantation has major problem as immunorejection. Recently, the solutions of pig to human xenotransplantation are commonly mentioned as having a genetically modification which include alpha 1, 3 galatosyl transferase knockout (GTKO) and immune-suppressing gene transgenic model. Unfortunately, the expression level of transgenic gene is very low activity. Therefore, development of gene overexpression system is the most urgent issue. Also, the tissue specific overexpression system is very important. Because most blood vessels are endothelial cells, establishment of the endothelial-specific promoter is attractive candidates for the introduction of suppressing immunorejection. In this study, we focus the ICAM2 promoter which has endothelial-specific regulatory region. To detect the regulatory region of ICAM2 promoter, we cloned 3.7 kb size mini-pig ICAM2 promoter. We conduct serial deletion of 5' flanking region of mini-pig ICAM2 promoter then selected promoter size as 1 kb, 1.5 kb, 2 kb, 2.5 kb, and 3 kb. To analyze promoter activity, luciferase assay system was conducted among these vectors and compare endothelial activity with epithelial cells. The reporter gene assay revealed that ICAM2 promoter has critical activity in endothelial cells (CPAE) and 1 kb size of ICAM2 promoter activity was significantly increased. Taken together, our studies suggest that mini-pig ICMA2 promoter is endothelial cell specific overexpression promoter and among above all size of promoters, 1 kb size promoter is optimal candidate to overcome the vascular immunorejection in pig to human xenotransplantation.