Analysis of SOX2 Gene Promoter Activity in Porcine Early Embryonic Development

SOX2 (sex determining region Y-box2) is one of the critical pluripotent factors that play a crucial role in the first lineage differentiation and maintenance of pluripotency in inner cell mass during early embryonic development. However, there are few researches about the regulation of the SOX2 promoter, especially in Sus scrofa. To analyzed the activity of SOX2 promoter in early porcine embryos, we determined the control system and established the microinjection system for assessing SOX2 promoter activity by analyzing the embryonic development and the expression of enhanced green fluorescence protein (EGFP) after micro-injected different EGFP plasmids at different times after activation of the oocytes. Then, we analyzed the structure of 5000 bp upstream of the SOX2 translation initiation site and found there were four transcription factor binding site clusters. Next, we designed and constructed promoter-containing plasmids to analyze the function of each cluster. To detect the activity of different promoters, we assessed the mCherry expression in protein levels and mRNA levels by analyzing the mCherry fluorescence intensity and qRT-PCR after injecting plasmids into embryos. These results showed that the activity of the shorted promoter, with the region from 2254 bp to 2442 bp upstream of translation initiation site deleted, decreased to 17.8% at 4-cell and 8-cell stages compared with the full-length promoter. This region included two NF-AT transcription factor binding sites, which indicated that the NF-AT binding site is a key region to regulate the activity of the SOX2 promoter. The results provide important data for determination the mechanism of porcine SOX2 regulation.