MEF2 is upregulated during cardiac hypertrophy and is required for normal post-natal growth of the myocardium.

In mammals, growth of the fetal heart is regulated by proliferation of cardiac muscle cells. At later stages of pre-natal life, this proliferation diminishes profoundly [1] [2] and the dramatic expansion in heart size during the transition to adulthood is due exclusively to hypertrophy of individual cardiomyocytes [3] [4] [5]. Cardiomyocyte hypertrophy also contributes to the pathology of most post-natal heart disease [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]. Within this context, numerous signal transduction pathways have been implicated as the link between the effector(s) and altered cardiac gene expression [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]. A common pathway has yet to be discovered, however. Here, we found that the activity of the stress-activated kinase p38 was enhanced in both types of cardiomyocyte hypertrophy. We also found that a target of the activated p38 kinase is the cardiac transcription factor MEF2. Transgenic mice expressing a dominant-negative form of MEF2C displayed attenuated post-natal growth of the myocardium. These results provide the first evidence for a single pathway regulating both normal and pathologic cardiomyocyte hypertrophy.

The beta-globin locus control region enhances transcription of but does not confer position-independent expression onto the lacZ gene in transgenic mice.

The beta-globin locus control region (LCR) confers high levels of position-independent, copy number-dependent expression onto globin transgenes. Here > 40 independent transgenic mouse lines and founders that carried the LCR in cis with the beta-globin gene promoter driving a lacZ reporter gene were studied. Expression of the lacZ transgene was assayed by measuring beta-galactosidase enzyme activity in fetal liver extracts, the levels of which correlated with the quantity of lacZ mRNA determined using RNase protection assays. Unexpectedly, expression of the lacZ transgene was found to show strong position effects, varying as much as 700-fold per transgene copy. These position effects occurred even if the whole beta-globin gene was incorporated as part of the lacZ reporter gene. Moreover, DNase I-hypersensitive sites appeared in the transgene LCR in high expressing but not in low expressing lines, suggesting that the LCR itself was position dependent. In contrast, MEL cell clones, in which transcriptionally active integration sites were selected for, gave < 13-fold variation in expression per copy of an LCR-lacZ construct. These results show that the lacZ reporter affects the ability of the LCR to activate chromatin in mice and that culture cells are not an adequate model for position-independent gene expression studies.