scholarly journals The histone variant H2A.Z and chromatin remodeler BRAHMA act coordinately and antagonistically to regulate transcription and nucleosome dynamics in Arabidopsis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Shannon Torres ◽  
Roger B. Deal

ABSTRACTPlants adapt to changes in their environment by regulating transcription and chromatin organization. The histone H2A variant H2A.Z and the SWI2/SNF2 ATPase BRAHMA have overlapping roles in positively and negatively regulating environmentally responsive genes in Arabidopsis, but the extent of this overlap was uncharacterized. Both have been associated with various changes in nucleosome positioning and stability in different contexts, but their specific roles in transcriptional regulation and chromatin organization need further characterization. We show that H2A.Z and BRM act both cooperatively and antagonistically to contribute directly to transcriptional repression and activation of genes involved in development and response to environmental stimuli. We identified 8 classes of genes that show distinct relationships between H2A.Z and BRM and their roles in transcription. We found that H2A.Z contributes to a range of different nucleosome properties, while BRM stabilizes nucleosomes where it binds and destabilizes and/or repositions flanking nucleosomes. H2A.Z and BRM contribute to +1 nucleosome destabilization, especially where they coordinately regulate transcription. We also found that at genes regulated by both BRM and H2A.Z, both factors overlap with the binding sites of light-regulated transcription factors PIF4, PIF5, and FRS9, and that some of the FRS9 binding sites are dependent on H2A.Z and BRM for accessibility. Collectively, we comprehensively characterized the antagonistic and cooperative contributions of H2A.Z and BRM to transcriptional regulation, and illuminated their interrelated roles in chromatin organization. The variability observed in their individual functions implies that both BRM and H2A.Z have more context-specific roles within diverse chromatin environments than previously assumed.

Development ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 126 (6) ◽  
pp. 1201-1210 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.F. Hewitt ◽  
B.S. Strunk ◽  
C. Margulies ◽  
T. Priputin ◽  
X.D. Wang ◽  
...  

Early developmental patterning of the Drosophila embryo is driven by the activities of a diverse set of maternally and zygotically derived transcription factors, including repressors encoded by gap genes such as Kruppel, knirps, giant and the mesoderm-specific snail. The mechanism of repression by gap transcription factors is not well understood at a molecular level. Initial characterization of these transcription factors suggests that they act as short-range repressors, interfering with the activity of enhancer or promoter elements 50 to 100 bp away. To better understand the molecular mechanism of short-range repression, we have investigated the properties of the Giant gap protein. We tested the ability of endogenous Giant to repress when bound close to the transcriptional initiation site and found that Giant effectively represses a heterologous promoter when binding sites are located at −55 bp with respect to the start of transcription. Consistent with its role as a short-range repressor, as the binding sites are moved to more distal locations, repression is diminished. Rather than exhibiting a sharp ‘step-function’ drop-off in activity, however, repression is progressively restricted to areas of highest Giant concentration. Less than a two-fold difference in Giant protein concentration is sufficient to determine a change in transcriptional status of a target gene. This effect demonstrates that Giant protein gradients can be differentially interpreted by target promoters, depending on the exact location of the Giant binding sites within the gene. Thus, in addition to binding site affinity and number, cis element positioning within a promoter can affect the response of a gene to a repressor gradient. We also demonstrate that a chimeric Gal4-Giant protein lacking the basic/zipper domain can specifically repress reporter genes, suggesting that the Giant effector domain is an autonomous repression domain.


1999 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Imhof ◽  
Marion Schuierer ◽  
Oliver Werner ◽  
Markus Moser ◽  
Christina Roth ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT AP-2 transcription factors have been suggested to exert key regulatory functions in vertebrate embryonic development, in tumorigenicity of various cancer cell types, and in controlling cell cycle and apoptotic effector genes. In this study, we investigated transcriptional regulation of the AP-2α gene promoter mediated by an autoregulatory element (referred to as A32) with a core consensus AP-2 binding site at position −336 relative to the mRNA initiation site. AP-2 and multiple different nuclear proteins in HeLa and Neuro2A cell extracts form specific bandshifts with the A32 element. By screening a mouse brain cDNA expression library, we isolated two different cDNAs encoding the transcription factor BTEB-1 and a novel zinc finger protein, AP-2rep. AP-2rep reveals a modular structure with homology to transcription factors of the wt-1/egr-1-family. AP-2rep, BTEB-1, and AP-2 interact in a mutually exclusive manner with overlapping binding sites in the A32 element. Transfection studies revealed that BTEB-1 is a strong activator of AP-2α promoter activity, whereas cotransfected AP-2α resulted in moderate autoactivation of promoter activity. In contrast, AP-2rep confers strong transcriptional repression to the AP-2α gene, and we observed an excellent correlation between induction of AP-2rep mRNA expression and downregulation of AP-2α mRNA during development of the kidney. In summary, we have identified multiple transcription factors and cloned from an expression library a novel zinc finger silencing factor, AP-2rep, mediating positive and negative regulation of AP-2α expression through a set of overlappingcis-regulatory promoter elements.


1999 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 2977-2985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhuvana Balasubramanian ◽  
Randall H. Morse

ABSTRACT The yeast transcriptional activator Gal4p can bind to sites in nucleosomal DNA in vivo which it is unable to access in vitro. One event which could allow proteins to bind to otherwise inaccessible sites in chromatin in living cells is DNA replication. To determine whether replication is required for Gal4p to bind to nucleosomal sites in yeast, we have used previously characterized chromatin reporters in which Gal4p binding sites are incorporated into nucleosomes. We find that Gal4p is able to perturb nucleosome positioning via nucleosomal binding sites in yeast arrested either in G1, with α-factor, or in G2/M, with nocodazole. Similar results were obtained whether Gal4p synthesis was induced from the endogenous promoter by growth in galactose medium or by an artificial, hormone-inducible system. We also examined binding of theDrosophila transcriptional activator Bicoid, which belongs to the homeodomain class of transcription factors. We show that Bicoid, like Gal4p, can bind to nucleosomal sites inSWI + and swi1Δ yeast and in the absence of replication. Our results indicate that some feature of the intracellular environment other than DNA replication or the SWI-SNF complex permits factor access to nucleosomal sites.


2005 ◽  
Vol 187 (3) ◽  
pp. 912-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack S. Ikeda ◽  
Anuradha Janakiraman ◽  
David G. Kehres ◽  
Michael E. Maguire ◽  
James M. Slauch

ABSTRACT Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium has two manganese transport systems, MntH and SitABCD. MntH is a bacterial homolog of the eukaryotic natural resistance-associated macrophage protein 1 (Nramp1), and SitABCD is an ABC-type transporter. Previously we showed that mntH is negatively controlled at the transcriptional level by the trans-acting regulatory factors, MntR and Fur. In this study, we examined the transcriptional regulation of sitABCD and compared it to the transcriptional regulation of mntH by constructing lacZ fusions to the promoter regions with and without mutations in putative MntR and/or Fur binding sites. The presence of Mn caused transcriptional repression of the sitABCD and mntH promoters primarily via MntR, but Fur was also capable of some repression in response to Mn. Likewise, Fe in the medium repressed transcription of both sit and mntH primarily via Fur, although MntR was also involved in this response. Transcriptional control by MntR and Fur was disrupted by site-specific mutations in the putative MntR and Fur binding sites, respectively. Transcription of the sit operon was also affected by the oxygen level and growth phase, but the increased expression observed under high oxygen conditions and higher cell densities is consistent with decreased availability of metals required for repression by the metalloregulatory proteins.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Viktor Martyanov ◽  
Robert H. Gross

The transcription factor complexes Mlu1-box binding factor (MBF) and Swi4/6 cell cycle box binding factor (SBF) regulate the cell cycle in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. They activate hundreds of genes and are responsible for nor-mal cell cycle progression from G1 to S phase. We investigated the conservation of MBF and SBF binding sites during fungal evolution. Orthologs of S. cerevisiae targets of these transcription factors were identified in 37 fungal species and their upstream regions were analyzed for putative transcription factor binding sites. Both groups displayed enrichment in specific putative regulatory DNA sequences in their upstream regions and showed different preferred upstream motif loca-tions, variable patterns of evolutionary conservation of the motifs and enrichment in unique biological functions for the regulated genes. The results indicate that despite high sequence similarity of upstream DNA motifs putatively associated with G1-S transcriptional regulation by MBF and SBF transcription factors, there are important upstream sequence feature differences that may help differentiate the two seemingly similar regulatory modes. The incorporation of upstream motif sequence comparison, positional distribution and evolutionary variability of the motif can complement functional infor-mation about roles of the respective gene products and help elucidate transcriptional regulatory pathways and functions.


Blood ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 120 (21) ◽  
pp. SCI-30-SCI-30
Author(s):  
Jay L. Hess ◽  
Cailin Collins ◽  
Joel Bronstein ◽  
Yuqing Sun ◽  
Surya Nagaraja

Abstract Abstract SCI-30 HOXA9 plays important roles in both development and hematopoiesis and is overexpressed in more than 50 percent of acute myeloid leukemias (AML). Nearly all cases of AML with mixed lineage leukemia (MLL) translocations show increased HOXA9 expression, as well as cases with mutation of the nucleophosmin gene NPM1, overexpression of CDX2, and fusions of NUP98. In most cases, upregulation of HOXA9 is accompanied by upregulation of its homeodomain-containing cofactor MEIS1, which directly interacts with HOXA9. While HOXA9 alone is sufficient for transformation of hematopoietic stem cells in culture, the addition of MEIS1 increases the transformation efficiency and results in rapidly fatal leukemias in transplanted animals. Despite the crucial role that HOXA9 plays in development, hematopoiesis, and leukemia, its transcriptional targets and mechanisms of action are poorly understood. We have used ChIP-seq to identify Hoxa9 and Meis1 binding sites on a genome-wide level in myeloblastic cells, profiled their associated epigenetic modifications, identified the target genes regulated by HOXA9 and identified HOXA9 interacting proteins. HOXA9 and MEIS1 cobind at hundreds of promoter distal, highly evolutionarily conserved sites showing high levels of histone H3K4 monomethylation and CBP/P300 binding. These include many proleukemogenic gene loci, such as Erg, Flt3, Myb, Lmo2, and Sox4. In addition, HOXA9 binding sites overlap a subset of enhancers previously implicated in myeloid differentiation and inflammation. HOXA9 binding at enhancers stabilizes association of MEIS1 and lineage-restricted transcription factors, including C/EBPα, PU.1, and STAT5A/B thereby promoting CBP/p300 recruitment, histone acetylation, and transcriptional activation. Current efforts are focused on using both biochemical and genetic approaches to assess the role of HOXA9 “enhanceosome” components C/EBPα, PU.1, and STAT5A/B in transcriptional regulation and leukemogenesis. Studies to date suggest that C/EBPα and PU.1 binding can occur in the absence of HOXA9/MEIS1, supporting a model in which these proteins act as pioneer transcription factors for establishment of poised, but not activated, HOXA9-regulated enhancers. Work is under way to assess the impact of high-level HOXA9 and MEIS1 on enhanceosome assembly and the role of recruitment of transcriptional coactivators involved in target gene up- or downregulation, including histone acetyltransferases and chromatin remodeling complexes. Collectively, our findings suggest that HOXA9-regulated enhancers are a fundamental mechanism of HOX-mediated transcription in normal development that is deregulated in leukemia. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Joon Kim ◽  
Kaitlin Rhee ◽  
Jonathan Liu ◽  
Paul Jeammet ◽  
Meghan A Turner ◽  
...  

A challenge in quantitative biology is to predict output patterns of gene expression from knowledge of input transcription factor patterns and from the arrangement of binding sites for these transcription factors on regulatory DNA. We tested whether widespread thermodynamic models could be used to infer parameters describing simple regulatory architectures that inform parameter-free predictions of more complex enhancers in the context of transcriptional repression by Runt in the early fruit fly embryo. By modulating the number and placement of Runt binding sites within an enhancer, and quantifying the resulting transcriptional activity using live imaging, we discovered that thermodynamic models call for higher-order cooperativity between multiple molecular players. This higher-order cooperativity capture the combinatorial complexity underlying eukaryotic transcriptional regulation and cannot be determined from simpler regulatory architectures, highlighting the challenges in reaching a predictive understanding of transcriptional regulation in eukaryotes and calling for approaches that quantitatively dissect their molecular nature.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. e10-e10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quy Xiao Xuan Lin ◽  
Denis Thieffry ◽  
Sudhakar Jha ◽  
Touati Benoukraf

Abstract Transcription factors (TFs) are sequence-specific DNA binding proteins, fine-tuning spatiotemporal gene expression. Since genomic occupancy of a TF is highly dynamic, it is crucial to study TF binding sites (TFBSs) in a cell-specific context. To date, thousands of ChIP-seq datasets have portrayed the genomic binding landscapes of numerous TFs in different cell types. Although these datasets can be browsed via several platforms, tools that can operate on that data flow are still lacking. Here, we introduce TFregulomeR (https://github.com/benoukraflab/TFregulomeR), an R-library linked to an up-to-date compendium of cistrome and methylome datasets, implemented with functionalities that facilitate integrative analyses. In particular, TFregulomeR enables the characterization of TF binding partners and cell-specific TFBSs, along with the study of TF’s functions in the context of different partnerships and DNA methylation levels. We demonstrated that TFs’ target gene ontologies can differ notably depending on their partners and, by re-analyzing well characterized TFs, we brought to light that numerous leucine zipper TFBSs derived from ChIP-seq experiments documented in current databases were inadequately characterized, due to the fact that their position weight matrices were assembled using a mixture of homodimer and heterodimer binding sites. Altogether, analyses of context-specific transcription regulation with TFregulomeR foster our understanding of regulatory network-dependent TF functions.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Ren ◽  
Hebing Chen ◽  
Feng Liu ◽  
Hao Li ◽  
Xiaochen Bo ◽  
...  

Accurately identifying binding sites of transcription factors (TFs) is crucial to understand the mechanisms of transcriptional regulation and human disease. We present incorporating Find Occurrence of Regulatory Motifs (iFORM), an easy-to-use tool for scanning DNA sequence with TF motifs described as position weight matrices (PWMs). iFORM achieves higher accuracy and sensitivity by integrating the results from five classical motif discovery programs based on Fisher's combined probability test. We have used iFORM to provide accurate results on a variety of data in the ENCODE Project and the NIH Roadmap Epigenomics Project, and has demonstrated its utility to further understand individual roles of functional elements.iFORM can be freely accessed athttps://github.com/wenjiegroup/iFORM.


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