Cloning of a minimal protein-C promoter for highly liver specific gene expression

Background: Promoters exclusively activated in the liver are a prerequisite for liver specific gene therapy or transgenic animals. Commonly used for this purpose, promoters for Albumin or há-AT could be insufficient to avoid any background gene expression in other tissue than liver. To address this question we focused on the promoter of human Protein C (PROC) which is involved in the regulation of blood coagulation and is exclusively expressed in the liver. Liver specific transcriptional activation largely depends on a short arrangement of binding sites for HNF-1, HNF-3, HNF-6 and NF-1 surrounding the transcript…