Building Transcriptional Regulatory Complexes: Signals and Surfaces

  1. K.R. YAMAMOTO,
  2. B.D. DARIMONT,
  3. R.L. WAGNER, and
  4. J.A. IÑIGUEZ-LLUHÍ
  1. Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, *Graduate Group in Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94143-0450

This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.

Excerpt

Unlike DNA replication, in which every base pair ofthe genome is copied precisely once per cell per generation, transcription of DNA to RNA is differential andhighly selective. Many transcripts are rare, accumulatingto one copy per cell or less, whereas others are massivelyexpressed. Perhaps only 7% of the mammalian genome isever transcribed. As first established in elegant studies inphage and bacterial systems (Beckwith and Zipser 1970;Ptashne 1986), the selectivity and extent of eukaryoticmRNA synthesis are specified in part by two classes ofgenomic sites: promoter sequences at which the transcription machinery (including RNA polymerase II) assembles and initiates RNA polymerization (Losick andChamberlin 1976) and response elements at which regulatory factors bind and alter the efficiency of promoterfunction (McKnight and Yamamoto 1992)...

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