QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s):
Home     Help     Feedback     Subscriptions     Archive     Search     Table of Contents

First published online May 1, 2006

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Related articles in Development Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

TAGging early transcription

What triggers zygotic gene expression in very early Drosophila embryos?

Widespread zygotic expression begins at the blastoderm stage, but little is known about the regulation of the small numbers of genes transcribed in the pre-cellular blastoderm while the rest of the genome is still silent. Thomas Cline and colleagues (p. 1967) noticed that the sex determination genes - which have to be expressed early so that X-dosage compensation can kick in before widespread zygotic transcription begins - all possess multiple copies of the sequence CAGGTAG. Using a computational search, they found that this sequence, or similar degenerate sequences, are overrepresented upstream of most pre-blastoderm-expressed zygotic genes; they call these sequences the TAGteam. Remarkably, eliminating TAGteam sites causes the late transcription of genes carrying these sequences, and duplication of the minimal TAGteam sequence speeds up transcription. The authors suggest that the transcriptional regulation of these very early genes involves activators that bind the TAGteam motif, and they discuss approaches to identify these (probably maternally derived) regulatory proteins.

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

Related articles in Development:

The TAGteam DNA motif controls the timing of Drosophila pre-blastoderm transcription

John R. ten Bosch, Joseph A. Benavides, and Thomas W. Cline
Development 2006 133: 1967-1977. [Abstract] [Full Text]  

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Related articles in Development Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?