Conditional RNA interference achieved by Oct-1 POU/rtTA fusion protein activator and a modified TRE-mouse U6 promoter

RNA interference (RNAi) is a powerful technique and is widely used to down-regulate expression of specific genes in cultured cells and in vivo. In this paper, we report our development of a new tetracycline-inducible RNAi expression using a modified TRE-mouse U6 promoter in which the distal sequence element (DSE) was replaced by the tetracycline-responsive element (TRE). The modified TRE-mouse U6 promoter can be activated by a Tet-on version tetracycline-regulated artificial activator rTetOct which was constructed by fusing the rtTA DNA binding domain with the Oct-1 POU activation domain. This rTetOct/TRE-U6 system was successfully applied to conditionally and reversibly down-regulate the expression of endogenous p53 gene in MCF7 cells, and the expression of β-defensin gene (mBin1b) either transiently expressed in COS7 cells or stably expressed in CHO cells.