Characterization of the <i>INTS8</i> mutations.

Abstract

<p>(A) qRT-PCR on fibroblast-derived RNA of the patients (III-2, III-3, III-4), their unaffected sibling (III-1), and two age-matched control cell lines (C1, C2), normalized for <i>GAPDH</i> expression. Expression of the c.893A>G allele vs. wild type was measured using a primer located at the c.2917-2925del locus (<i>INTS8</i> non-ΔEVL allele). (B) Schematic overview of INTS8 genomic and protein sequence. The c.893A>G mutation (in red) is located at the 5’ end of the exon8 of the transcript variant 3 that contains a premature stop codon (PTC). (C) Schematic of the GFP-minigene reporter construct used to evaluate the effect of the c.893A>G mutation on <i>INTS8</i> exon 8 splicing pattern. Size of the corresponding amplicons is indicated on the left (D) RT-PCR analysis of RNA isolated from HeLa (lanes 1–3) or HEK293T cells (lanes 4–6) transfected with the GFP-minigene constructs. The empty reporter (GFP) is used as a control. (E) Western blot analysis of flag-affinity eluates from HEK293T stable lines expressing 3xFlag-tagged INTS8 wild type (WT) or INTS8ΔEVL. (F) Western blots on total cell extracts from patient and control primary fibroblasts. (G) qRT-PCR showing normalized expression of misprocessed U1, U2 and U4 snRNAs in total RNA extracted from patient III-2 and III-4 fibroblasts compared to two controls. All pairwise comparisons between patient and control UsnRNA levels are significant (at least p<0.05, Student’s T-test) to the exception of III-2 and C1 for UsnRNA U1 (p<0.06).</p