Abstract

The expression of LDH-C (Lactate dehydrogenase C) gene is restricted in mature germ cells; however multiple splice variants of LDH-C expressed in human cancers and yak normal testes were reported recently. In order to know if there are any LDH-C splice variants in human normal testes, we set out to clone the putative variants in human and rat. Four splicing variants in human testes, 1 splicing variant in human spermatozoa, 6 splicing variants in rat testes and 1 splicing variant in rat non-testes tissues (liver, heart and muscle) were cloned. The putative polypeptides encoded by these variants were compared with the full-length LDH-C protein, the results showed that these putative polypeptides were truncated LDH-C proteins or truncated LDH-C proteins with a few amino acid residues different at N or C terminal. This suggested that these variants are possibly not used for translation, but targets of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay. Western blotting did not detect any bands with similar molecular weight as the putative polypeptides. RT-PCR showed that the expression levels of the splicing variants were significant during development of rat testes. The results indicate that LDH-C was not silenced by transcriptional repression in non-mature germ cells, but significantly transcripted and alternatively spliced.

Keywords:

Alternative splicing, development, expression regulation, lactate dehydrogenase c, splicing variant,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.