Figure 1

Molecular attributes of zebrafish ΔNp53. (A) RT-PCR analysis of zebrafish ΔNp53. The zebrafish ΔNp53 transcript was detected in cDNA preparations from irradiated embryos using the intron 2 forward primer (I2) and the exon 5 (E5) reverse primer. (B) Comparative view of human and zebrafish ΔNp53 sequences. In zebrafish, the alternatively spliced intron 2 (blue highlight) contains an in frame stop codon (T; red) and an alternate start codon (M2; purple) in frame with the p53 ORF of exon 3. (C) Semi-quantitative RT-PCR analysis of p53 isoform expression 6 h post irradiation of 24 hpf embryos. (D) Microinjection of 5'UTR-ΔNp53 M2-luciferase mRNA into zebrafish embryos. Strong expression of the luciferase reporter gene was achieved using this expression construct, which was abrogated by changing the putative M2 translation initiation site to glycine.