Brief report Human erythroid porphobilinogen deaminase exists in 2 splice variants

(PBGD) is, reportedly, encoded by 2 dis-tinct messenger RNAs (mRNAs) transcrib-ing from a single gene. The ubiquitous form of the PBGD gene product is often used as an endogenous reference in gene expression studies because it is pseudo-gene free and has minimal transcriptional variability among tissues. A distinct ery-throid-specific gene product has also been described because of the alternate splicing of the gene. Here is reported the existence of an additional erythroid-spe-cific isoform of PBGD mRNA in primary cells. (Blood. 2001;97:815-817) © 2001 by The American Society of Hematolog