Characterization of promoter elements required for cardiac chamber-specific expression

Salmon cardiac natriuretic peptide (sCP, an A-type natriuretic peptide) is an excellent model for the study of cardiac chamber-specific gene expression because it is uniquely specific to the heart and its promoter drives gene expression effectively in mammalian cardiac atrial but not in ventricular cells. We have now prepared hybrid luciferase constructs containing specific sequences from both sCP and BNP 5′ promoters. According to our results the simple addition of a short rat BNP proximal promoter fragment to the inert 846 nucleotide sCP proximal promoter increases 100 times the basal activity of the sCP promoter in rat ventricular cardiomyocytes, and also conveys inducibility by mechanical load and endothelin-1. Thus, a small rBNP promoter fragment can transform the prototypical A-type natriuretic peptide regulation of sCP to B-type regulation, a result which argues against a major role of repressors causing the low expression level of A-type peptides in ventricular cardiomyocytes.