Figure 3

The alternative ADAM15 exon use in human tissues. (A) Schematic representation of the identified human ADAM15 mRNA variants. For clarity, only the cytosolic-encoding region containing the alternatively used exons is shown. The solid connecting lines indicate splicing of the constitutive exons and the dashed connecting lines indicated splicing of the alternatively used exons. The exons are shown as black boxes, with gray shading indicating the alternative 5'- and 3'-ends of the a/b variants of the exons 20 and 21, respectively. (B) ADAM15 mRNA variant profiles in normal human tissues, detected with fluorescence-PCR/capillary electrophoresis. The relative abundance of the mRNA variants (columns) within given tissue (rows) is indicated with the color coding. Black indicates relative abundance below 0.2% and colors from blue through yellow to bright red show the relative abundances from 0.2 to 88% (see the color key bar). The bottom row shows the average of the relative abundances in all examined tissues. (C) Real-time PCR (LightCycler) quantitation (solid bars) of ADAM15 expression level and that defined with fPCR/capillary electrophoresis as the combined peak area of all detected ADAM15 cDNA variants within given samples (open bars). The vertical axis shows the TBP-normalized expression levels relative to thymus (the lowest tissue expression, value set to 1.0). The similarity of the tissue distribution (Pearson correlation 0.902) determined with the two methods indicates that significant amounts of possible additional mRNA variants were not missed with the fPCR/capillary electrophoresis detection.