Unusual proopiomelanocortin ribonucleic acids in extrapituitary tissues: intronless transcripts in testes and long...

The POMC gene is predominantly expressed in the pituitary gland; it is also expressed in various extrapituitary tissues. While POMC mRNAs of similar size (approximately equal to 1000 nucleotides) are present in the anterior and neurointermediate lobes of the pituitary, other POMC-expressing tissues contain POMC mRNAs of different sizes. Longer POMC mRNAs are observed in the hypothalamus. Using S1 nuclease mapping and mRNA deadenylation by RNase H, we have shown that these large hypothalamic POMC mRNAs have longer poly(A) tails than pituitary POMC transcripts but contain the same transcripted sequences. In contrast, the testes contain POMC transcripts which are smaller than pituitary POMC mRNA. RNase and S1 nuclease mapping analyses suggest that these short transcripts do not contain sequences transcribed from pituitary exons 1 and 2. Indeed, as revealed by primer-extension experiments, these transcripts appear to initiate within exon 3 sequences of the POMC gene. The heterogeneous 5'-ends of these short testicular transcripts map into the NH2-terminal portion of the precursor in the region encoding gamma MSH; if ever translated, these transcripts would produce a form of POMC that would be truncated at the NH2-terminus and therefore would be devoid of any signal peptide sequence. Interestingly, the sequence of the short testicular transcripts corresponds to that of the mouse POMC pseudogene, suggesting that this POMC pseudogene may have derived from genomic integration of testicular transcripts via a cDNA intermediate.