Blood, Vol. 95 No. 5 (March 1), 2000:
pp. 1819-1826
A study of the coregulation and tissue specificity of XG
and MIC2 gene expression in eukaryotic cells
Claude Fouchet,
Pierre Gane,
Martine Huet,
Marc Fellous,
Philippe Rouger,
George Banting,
Jean-Pierre Cartron, and
Claude Lopez
From Inserm U76, Institut National de la Transfusion Sanguine, and
Institut Pasteur, Paris, France, and the Department of Biochemistry,
University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.
CD99, the product of the MIC2 gene, exhibits an
erythroid-specific quantitative polymorphism coregulated with the
polymorphism of the XG blood group gene. As a preliminary study of this
phenomenon, human XG and CD99 recombinant proteins were expressed in
murine RAG cells and analyzed by flow cytometry. Both proteins were
expressed independently and at a similar level in single and double
transfectants. Immunoprecipitation and Western blot analysis, using the
murine monoclonal antibodies NBL-1 and 12E7, revealed species of 26 kd (XG) and 32 kd (CD99), respectively. A putative 28-kd intracellular precursor of CD99 was also detected, as was a 26-kd species after neuraminidase treatment of CD99-expressing cells. No evidence of
association or complex formation between XG and CD99 proteins could be
proven, either on transfected RAG cells or on human erythrocytes. These
results were confirmed using somatic hybrids between single transfectants. These findings suggest that the phenotypic relationship between XG and CD99 is mostly regulated at the transcriptional level,
but they do not formally exclude some posttranscriptional effect.
Studies on the tissue specificity of XG expression showed that
surface expression of the XG protein could not be restored in somatic
hybrids between B-lymphoblastoid cell lines from Xg(a+) persons and fibroblasts (RAG) or erythroid (MEL) cells. RT-PCR analysis
of the transcripts revealed the existence of an XG mRNA in each
cell line, suggesting that the tissue-specific regulation of cell
surface XG expression occurs either at a quantitative transcriptional
level or is a posttranscriptional event. By Northern blot analysis,
XG transcripts were detected in erythroid tissues and several
nonerythroid tissues.