A number of conditions related to sex-reversal in boys and men and precocious puberty in girls are caused by estrogen-secreting adrenal tumors. In these tumors, cytochrome P450 aromatase (aromatase) that is encoded in the CYP19 gene is expressed at high levels. To investigate the molecular mechanism of aromatase expression in these adrenal tumors, we characterized the activity, gene transcript and genomic promoter region of aromatase in the human adrenocortical carcinoma cell line H295R. Aromatase activity and the transcript of the CYP19 gene were highly up-regulated by forskolin, but not by dexamethasone. The results from exon I-specific reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR and the transfection of reporter constructs suggested that promoter I.3 and promoter II were activated in H295R. Deletion and mutation analysis suggested that cAMP response element-like sequence (CLS) and steroidogenic factor-1 (SF-1) motif, were critical for the activation of promoter II. The results of this work should provide the basis for the molecular analysis of aromatase expression in adrenocortical cells.

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