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Medientyp:
E-Artikel
Titel:
Function and Specificity of Synthetic Hox Transcription Factors in Vivo
Beteiligte:
Papadopoulos, Dimitrios K.;
Vukojević, Vladana;
Adachi, Yoshitsugu;
Terenius, Lars;
Rigler, Rudolf;
Gehring, Walter J.
Erschienen:
National Academy of Sciences, 2010
Erschienen in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Sprache:
Englisch
ISSN:
0027-8424
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Beschreibung:
<p>Homeotic (Hox) genes encode transcription factors that confer segmental identity along the anteroposterior axis of the embryo. However the molecular mechanisms underlying Hox-mediated transcription and the differential requirements for specificity in the regulation of the vast number of Hox-target genes remain ill-defined. Here we show that synthetic Sex combs reduced (Scr) genes that encode the Scr C terminus containing the homedomain (HD) and YPWM motif (Scr-HD) are functional in vivo. Synthetic Scr-HD peptides can induce ectopie salivary glands in the embryo and homeotic transformations in the adult fly, act as transcriptional activators and repressors during development and participate in protein-protein interactions. Their transformation capacity was found to be enhanced over their full-length counterpart and mutations known to transform the full-length protein into constitutively active or inactive variants behaved accordingly in the synthetic peptides. Our results show that synthetic Scr-HD genes are sufficient for homeotic function in Drosophila and suggest that the N terminus of Scr has a role in transcriptional potency, rather than specificity. We also demonstrate that synthetic peptides behave largely in a predictable way, by exhibiting Scr-specific phenotypes throughout development, which makes them an important tool for synthetic biology.</p>