H19 and Igf2 are reciprocally imprinted genes that lie 90 kb apart on mouse chromosome 7. The two genes are coexpressed during development, with the H19 gene expressed exclusively from the maternal chromosome and Igf2 from the paternal chromosome. It has been proposed that their reciprocal imprinting is governed by a competition between the genes for a common set of enhancers. The competition o...

H19 RNA is highly expressed at early postnatal ages and precipitously decreases at a specific time corresponding with increases in expression of genes important for mature liver function, such as drug metabolizing enzymes. H19's role in the regulation of liver maturation is currently unknown. Using an H19 knockout mouse model to determine the role of H19 in liver development, we quantified gene...

A stringent test for imprint control elements is to examine their function at ectopic loci in transgenic experiments. Igf2 and H19 are part of a larger imprinting region and as a first step, we examined these reciprocally imprinted genes in transgenic experiments using a 130 kb YAC clone. After paternal inheritance, H19 was appropriately repressed and Igf2 was expressed, irrespective of copy nu...

INTRODUCTION To investigate the associations between the mRNA levels of H19 in term placenta and risk of macrosomia. MATERIAL AND METHODS Term placentas were collected from 37 macrosomia and 37 matched neonates with normal birth weight (controls) born in Changzhou Women and Children Health Hospital, Jiangsu province, P. R. China from March 1 to June 30, 2008. The mRNA levels of H19 in those p...

With the recent advent of whole genome and transcriptome sequencing technologies, long non-coding RNAs have been brought into the spotlight in molecular biology. H19 was one of the first reported long non-coding RNAs; its expression is high in embryonic organs and absent or greatly reduced in most adult tissues. Accumulating evidence suggests that H19 plays crucial roles in embryogenesis. Howev...

In the past decade, studies of non-coding RNAs increase. Non-coding RNAs are divided in two classes: small and long non-coding RNA. It was shown that long non-coding RNAs regulate expression of 70% of genes. Long non-coding RNAs are involved in several cellular processes like epigenetic regulation, dosage compensation, alternative splicing and stem cells maintenance for example. Misregulations ...

In the previous study, we generated a rat model of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) induced by adriamycin and found that the expression of lncRNA H19 was significantly upregulated in myocardial tissue. The present study was aimed to investigate the potential role of H19 in the pathogenesis of adriamycin-induced DCM. H19 knockdown in the myocardium of DCM rats attenuated cardiomyocyte apoptosis and ...

Curative surgery is possible in barely 10% of patients with colorectal liver metastases and combined treatment modalities scarcely improve survival in this group of patients. Hence, investigations of new therapeutic modalities are crucial. Overexpression of the H19 gene in liver metastases points to H19 as a target for cancer gene therapy. Here we have evaluated the possibility of regional intr...

Imprinting disorders induced by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) usually lead to the abnormalities of cloned animals and low cloning efficiency. Histone deacetylase inhibitors have been shown to improve gene expression, genomic methylation reprogramming and the development of cloned embryos, however, the imprinting statuses in these treated embryos and during their subsequent development re...

Expression of imprinted genes is classically associated with differential methylation of specific CpG-rich DNA regions (DMRs). The H19/IGF2 locus is considered a paradigm for epigenetic regulation. In mice, as in humans, the essential H19 DMR--target of the CTCF insulator--is located between the two genes. Here, we performed a pyrosequencing-based quantitative analysis of its CpG methylation in...