Developmental expression of glial fibrillary acidic protein gene in human embryos.

ABSTRACT

Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) is an intermediate filament protein of astrocytes. We have shown by Northern blot analysis that GFAP mRNA first appears in the spinal cord at the age of 8 weeks and in the brain at the age of 9 weeks of embryogenesis, and its relative contents increases at later stages. A plasmid selected from a cDNA expression library with an insert encoding for almost full length of human GFAP was used in this study.