Abstract
High mobility group (HMG)-box proteins, a large and functionally diverse superfamily of architectural protein, are involved in the regulation of DNA-dependent processes such as transcription, replication and DNA repair via the HMG-box domain. Bobby sox homolog (BBX), a newly identified HMG-Box protein, may function as a sequence-specific transcription factor. However, its expression pattern and biological functions are largely unknown. In this work, phylogenetic analysis showed that BBX is highly conserved and belongs to a novel subfamily of HMG-Box superfamily together with CIC (capicua homolog). Real time RT-PCR and whole-mount in situ hybridization in zebrafish embryo revealed that bbx, cica, and cicb were maternally highly expressed from 4 cell to 1K cell stage, and the zygote expression was primarily distributed in the central nervous system (CNS) from 24 to 60 h post-fertilization (hpf). Immunohistochemistry analysis in mouse brain revealed that BBX was weakly expressed in the cerebellum and highly expressed in the cortex and hippocampus. These findings indicate that as a novel HMG-box protein, BBX maybe associated with CNS development and provides useful clues to further study of its biological functions.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Rui Gao for technical assistance. This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China Grant 2011CB944002 (to QZ) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant 31271563 (to QZ)
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Communicated by: Matthias Hammerschmidt
TieLin Chen, Li Zhou, and Yue Yuan contributed equally to this work.
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Fig. S1
Unrooted phylogenetic tree of human BBX HMG-box-like proteins. The protein sequences of different BBX HMG-Box likely proteins were analyzed using ClustalW, and an unrooted tree was constructed by neighbor join method. (JPEG 934 kb)
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Chen, T., Zhou, L., Yuan, Y. et al. Characterization of Bbx, a member of a novel subfamily of the HMG-box superfamily together with Cic . Dev Genes Evol 224, 261–268 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00427-014-0476-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00427-014-0476-x