Cloning and transcriptional activity of ovarian-specific promoter in dairy goats

Ovarian-specific promoter (OSP) is a tissue-specific promoter only expressed in the ovary to regulate its development. To investigate the activity of OSP in diverse dairy goat cells, OSP was cloned from dairy goat genome and used to construct the luciferase reporter vector pGL3-OSP to examine the transcriptional activity of OSP. Consequently, a 461-bp OSP fragment was obtained. Bioinformatics analysis indicated that the fragment contained multiple transcription factor binding sites, such as SRY, HSF, AP-1, C/EBP, CAAT, TATA, and so on, and the nucleotide sequence of OSP shared 99% and 97% similarity with those of OSP-1 and OSP-2 in rat. In addition, two variants were identified in the OSP (g.164T was deletion and g.375T