Figure 5. Transfection of mouse and rat evolutionarily conserved regions from the VIM and CD44 genes in wMC (rat) Müller cells. Constructs containing either 5′ (VIMM2, VIMR2, CD44M2, CD44R2) or 3′ (VIMR7 and VIMR8) UTRs exhibited high eGFP expression levels (shown in bold). VIM constructs are shown in red, and CD44 constructs are shown in blue; lighter colors are mouse constructs and darker colors are rat constructs. Bars indicate fold change in number of eGFP positive cells, normalized to the “first-generation” promoter-less parent vector (pFTMGW). The mean fluorescence intensity (MFI) for each construct was also normalized to the parent vector (pFTMGW) [22] and is shown immediately below each bar (shown in orange). Refer to Appendix 2 for genomic coordinates of each construct. The single asterisk equals p<0.01, the double asterisk equals p<0.001, and the triple asterisk equals p<0.0001, using a two-tailed Student's t-test assuming equal variances. Error bars represent 1 standard deviation.