Pancreatic SEC23B deficiency is sufficient to explain the perinatal lethality of germline SEC23B deficiency in mice

In humans, loss of function mutations in SEC23B result in Congenital Dyserythropoietic Anemia type II (CDAII), a disease limited to defective erythroid development. Patients with two nonsense SEC23B mutations have not been reported, suggesting that complete SEC23B deficiency might be lethal. We previously reported that SEC23B-deficient mice die perinatally, exhibiting massive pancreatic degeneration and that mice with hematopoietic SEC23B deficiency do not exhibit CDAII. We now show that SEC23B deficiency restricted to the pancreas is sufficient to explain the lethality observed in mice with global SEC23B-deficiency. Immunohistochemical stains demonstrate an acinar cell defect but normal islet cells. Mammalian genomes contain two Sec23 paralogs, Sec23A and Sec23B. The encoded proteins share ~85% amino acid sequence identity. We generate mice with pancreatic SEC23A deficiency and demonstrate that these mice survive normally, exhibiting normal pancreatic weights and histology. Taken together, these data demonstrate that SEC23B but not SEC23A is essential for murine pancreatic development. We also demonstrate that two BAC transgenes spanning Sec23b rescue the lethality of mice homozygous for a Sec23b gene trap allele, excluding a passenger gene mutation as the cause of the pancreatic lethality, and indicating that the regulatory elements critical for Sec23b pancreatic function reside within the BAC transgenes.