The Y-box motif mediates redox-dependent transcriptional activation in mouse cells.

We show here that the OxyR response element (ORE) in the bacterial oxyR promoter can also function as a redox-dependent enhancer in mammalian cells. Fusion of ORE to an SV40 basal promoter driving chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) expression confers H2O2 inducibility to expression of the cat gene in mouse Hepa-1 hepatoma cells. Nuclear extracts from these cells contain DNA-binding proteins that specifically interact with ORE DNA, cannot be completed by cognate oligonucleotides to AP-1 or NF kappa B, and are constitutively expressed, since treatment with H2O2 causes no detectable changes in binding activity or DNA-protein interaction. Recombinant cDNA clones that express ORE-binding proteins were isolated from a mouse hepatoma expression library and found to be representatives of two different members of the murine Y-box family of transcription factors. Canonical Y-box and ORE oligonucleotides compete with each other for binding to Y-box proteins in gel shift assays and antibodies to FRGY2, a Xenopus Y-box protein, supershift both Y-box and ORE DNA-protein complexes. In addition, antisense oligonucleotides to mouse YB-1 mRNA abolish induction of ORE-mediated cat expression by H2O2, and luciferase reporter constructs containing ORE, or the Y-box from the human MHC class II HLA-DQ gene, exhibit identical dose-dependent H2O2 inducibilities, which can be abolished by addition of 2-mercaptoethanol to the culture medium. These results suggest that the Y-box proteins may be an integral component of a eukaryotic redox signaling pathway.