Yamagishi Takumi, Hirose Shigehisa, Kondo Takashi
Kondo Research Unit, Brain Development Research Group, Brain Science Institute, Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2008 Apr;36(6):1965-75. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkm1079. Epub 2008 Feb 14.
Hox genes determine anterior-posterior specificity of an animal body. In mammals, these genes map onto four chromosomal loci in a clustered manner, and their expression is regulated in a coordinated manner according to their chromosomal structure. In the present study, we analysed the Hoxb9 promoter and found that promoter activity in cultured cells is linked to secondary structure formation of promoter DNA. In nuclear extracts, we also detected binding activity specific for secondary-structured DNA. We successfully isolated a candidate gene encoding this specific DNA-binding protein, FBXL10, and demonstrated the effects of the gene product on Hoxb9 promoter activity. Our results suggest that DNA can regulate gene expression by other, non-sequence-specific modes of genetic coding.
Hox基因决定动物身体的前后特异性。在哺乳动物中,这些基因以簇状方式定位在四个染色体位点上,并且它们的表达根据其染色体结构以协调的方式受到调控。在本研究中,我们分析了Hoxb9启动子,发现培养细胞中的启动子活性与启动子DNA的二级结构形成有关。在核提取物中,我们还检测到对二级结构DNA具有特异性的结合活性。我们成功分离出一个编码这种特异性DNA结合蛋白FBXL10的候选基因,并证明了该基因产物对Hoxb9启动子活性的影响。我们的结果表明,DNA可以通过其他非序列特异性的遗传编码模式来调节基因表达。