Isolation and Characterization of the Silk Fibroin Gene with Its Flanking Sequences
- Y. Suzuki and
- Y. Ohshima
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
The silk fibroin gene of the silkworm Bombyx mori reveals several unique features for transcriptional studies of tissue-specific genes (for review, see Suzuki 1976, 1977): (1) Although the fibroin gene exists as one copy per haploid complement (Suzuki et al. 1972; Gage and Manning 1976), its concentration in the B. mori genome is quite high (0.004%; Suzuki et al. 1972) because the genome size is small (0.52 pg; Gage 1974; Rasch 1974) and the gene is very large (about 11 × 106 daltons; Lizardi and Brown 1975; Lizardi et al. 1975). (2) More than 80% of the fibroin mRNA sequence is composed of very simple repetitious nucleotides of high GC content (Suzuki and Brown 1972; Suzuki and Suzuki 1974), and the gene can be identified unequivocally by RNase T1 finger-print analysis of the hybridized RNA (Suzuki et al. 1972). (3) The gene expression seems to be temporally regulated (Suzuki and...
