An Activation-independent Role of Transcription Factors in Insulator Function

Overview

Journal EMBO Rep

Specialty Molecular Biology

Date 2001 Mar 22

PMID 11258704

Citations 39

Authors

G Fourel

C Boscheron

E Revardel

E Lebrun

Y F Hu

K C Simmen

K Muller

R Li

N Mermod

E Gilson

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Chromatin insulators are defined as transcriptionally neutral elements that prevent negative or positive influence from extending across chromatin to a promoter. Here we show that yeast subtelomeric anti-silencing regions behave as boundaries to telomere-driven silencing and also allow discontinuous propagation of silent chromatin. These two facets of insulator activity, boundary and silencing discontinuity, can be recapitulated by tethering various transcription activation domains to tandem sites on DNA. Importantly, we show that these insulator activities do not involve direct transcriptional activation of the reporter promoter. These findings predict that certain promoters behave as insulators and partition genomes in functionally independent domains.

Citing Articles

Massively parallel characterization of insulator activity across the genome.

Hong C, Wu Y, Erickson A, Li J, Federico A, Cohen B Nat Commun. 2024; 15(1):8350.

PMID: 39333469 PMC: 11436800. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-52599-6.

Yeast heterochromatin stably silences only weak regulatory elements by altering burst duration.

Wu K, Dhillon N, Bajor A, Abrahamsson S, Kamakaka R Cell Rep. 2024; 43(4):113983.

PMID: 38517895 PMC: 11141299. DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.113983.

Yeast Heterochromatin Only Stably Silences Weak Regulatory Elements by Altering Burst Duration.

Wu K, Dhillon N, Bajor A, Abrahamson S, Kamakaka R bioRxiv. 2023; .

PMID: 37873261 PMC: 10592971. DOI: 10.1101/2023.10.05.561072.

Glc7/PP1 dephosphorylates histone H3T11 to regulate autophagy and telomere silencing in response to nutrient availability.

Zhang X, Yu Q, Wu Y, Zhang Y, He Y, Wang R Cell Discov. 2023; 9(1):71.

PMID: 37433812 PMC: 10336126. DOI: 10.1038/s41421-023-00551-1.

Partners in crime: Tbf1 and Vid22 promote expansions of long human telomeric repeats at an interstitial chromosome position in yeast.

Radchenko E, Aksenova A, Volkov K, Shishkin A, Pavlov Y, Mirkin S PNAS Nexus. 2022; 1(3):pgac080.

PMID: 35832866 PMC: 9272169. DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac080.

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