Previous studies in our laboratory have demonstrated that the thermosensitivity locus cosegregates with blood pressure and that the elevated expression and restriction fragment length polymorphism of HSP70 gene are associ-ated with hypertension. Cell protection against environ-mental stressors such as heat and chemicals is often accom-panied by up-regulated expression of a wide spectrum of heat sliock genes(HSP). To further investigate the interre-lation between HSP expression and blood pressure regulation, we employed an effective method of cloning 2 poten-tial hypertension-related HSPs. Synthetic oligonucleotides corresponding either to a higbly-conserved region of the known HSP family or a repetitive sequence in the protein- encoding gene were used as target primers for polymerase chain reaction (PCR). cDNA prepared from heat-stressed and non-stressed vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) of Brown Norway rats (BN.1x) and spontaneously hyperten-sive rats (SHRp) respectively served as template in the reaction. The PCR products were subsequently analyzed in a single-stranded conformational polymorphism (SSCP) electrophoresing system. Differential gene expression in BN.1x and SHRp was seen on autoradiographs of SSCP gel by comparing the migration patterns of PCR-amplified DNA fragments. Using this technique, we also found that HSP27 and a new member of the large HSP gene family were differentially expressed in BN.1x and SHRp VSMC.
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