The plasmid pCDNA- 4.5-kb rat TH promoter-EGFP can express EGFP in TH+ neurons.
I have a question as follow,
Does a plasmid pCDNA- 4.5-kb rat TH promoter-EGFP can work in mammalian cells, eg. BHK21?
Do you already have the plasmid made? If so, just try transfecting those cells with it and see if it does or it doesn't. After all you're going to have to do it anyway. I'm going out on a limb and betting it will work. Do the experiment- that's what scientists do. Or did before bioinformatics. Not that there's anything wrong with it.
Because very few expression constructs are made to include the tissue-specific (or even species specific) repressor regulatory regions, especially if strong expression is the goal. You would be surprised at how widely certain core promoters work to drive expression from constructs driven by them. E. g. Marit R. Myhre et al's 2006 paper" The 35S CaMV plant virus promoter is active in human enterocyte-like cells." Though this is not biologically significant other than showing how promoters can work in widely divergent systems from that in which they evolved. That promoter, by the way, is from Cauliflower Mosaic Virus, and it can drive expression in mammalian cells from constructs driven by it.
I think that the virus promoter can work in mammalian cells is a common phenomenon due to the virus usually use the host transcript and translation system. However, the mechanism may be not consistent with the tissue specific promoter.
The tissue specific promoter should be specific， at least neuronal promoter should not work in non-neuronal cells.
None the less- do the experiment and find out. We don't understand biology well enough to decide apriori from something like first principles to reliably predict the results of experiments in complex systems. I don't get some people's reluctance to try an experiment because it "might not work". I worked with a guy who didn't get tenure because he got lost in the weeds of never wanting an experiment to "fail" so he would do just about anything other than running the damned experiment and trouble shooting if it failed. We're not talking about complex experiments, we are talking about PCRs he was afraid might not work. He would spend his time doing CRAZY pointless things because they wouldn't fail. He did some clever things using early bioinformatics- but he sure did a lot of nutty things. Like temperature profiling his -20 freezer! I kid you not. He measured the temperature in a grid pattern in the -20 and showed me the temperature profile with pride and self congratulations, rather than do an experiment that might fail. It made me just nuts to work with the guy.
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