Isolation of an enhancer from the rat tyrosine hydroxylase promoter that supports long-term, neuronal-specific expression from a neurofilament promoter, in a helper virus-free HSV-1 vector system

Direct gene transfer into neurons, using a virus vector, has been used to study neuronal physiology and learning, and has potential for supporting gene therapy treatments for specific neurological diseases. Many of these applications require high-level, long-term recombinant gene expression, in forebrain neurons. We previously showed that addition of upstream sequences from the rat tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) promoter to a neurofilament heavy gene (NF-H) promoter supports long-term expression in forebrain neurons, from helper virus-free Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV-1) vectors. This element in the TH promoter satisfied the definition of an enhancer; it displayed activity at a distance from the basal promoter, and in both orientations. This enhancer supported physiological studies that required long-term expression; a modified neurofilament promoter, containing an insulator upstream of the TH-NFH promoter, supported expression in ∼ 11,400 striatal neurons at 6 months after gene transfer, and expression for 7, 8, or 14 months, the longest times tested. In contrast, the NF-H promoter alone does not support long-term expression, indicating that the critical sequences are in the 6.3 kb fragment of the TH promoter. In this study, we performed a deletion analysis to identify the critical sequences in the TH promoter that support long-term expression. We localized these critical sequences to an ∼ 320 bp fragment, and two subfragments of ∼ 100 bp each. Vectors that contained each of these small fragments supported levels of long-term, neuronal-specific expression that were similar to the levels supported by a vector that contained the initial 6.3 kb fragment of the TH promoter. These small fragments of the TH promoter may benefit construction of vectors for physiological studies, and may support studies on the mechanism by which this enhancer supports long-term expression.