Tissue-specific expression patterns of the RAGE receptor and its soluble forms--a result of regulated alternative splicing?

The receptor for advanced glycation end products (RAGE) is known to be causally involved in a variety of pathophysiological processes, e.g. immune/inflammatory disorders, Alzheimer disease, tumors, and abnormalities associated with diabetes as arteriosclerosis or disordered wound healing. So far, human cDNAs have been characterized encoding for the RAGE receptor and a truncated soluble form lacking the transmembrane and the cytosolic domain. The latter form represents a naturally occurring competitive inhibitor of signalling pathways induced by the membrane-standing RAGE receptor. In order to perform a relative expression analysis of both RAGE forms, an RT-PCR experiment was designed allowing the simultaneous amplification of corresponding transcripts. We were able to identify three novel human RAGE transcripts all encoding truncated soluble forms of RAGE. The relative expression ratios for the full-length RAGE transcript to the sum of its splice-variants encoding the soluble variants varied strongly among the tissues tested. Therefore, the pre-mRNA of RAGE must be subject to regulated alternative splicing activated by extracellular cues of yet unknown cellular signalling pathways. Thus, as deduced from the occurrence at the RNA level, it can be hypothesized that there is a complex RAGE regulation network involving isoforms competing for the binding of ligands.