GSBS Program
Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
UMMS Affiliation
Program in Molecular Medicine; Program in Cell Dynamics; Program in Gene Function and Expression
Date
5-12-2011
Document Type
Article
Medical Subject Headings
Caenorhabditis elegans; Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins; Transcription Factors; Trans-Activators
Disciplines
Biology | Cell and Developmental Biology | Genetics and Genomics | Life Sciences | Medicine and Health Sciences
Abstract
DRM is a conserved transcription factor complex that includes E2F/DP and pRB family proteins and plays important roles in development and cancer. Here we describe new aspects of DRM binding and function revealed through genome-wide analyses of the Caenorhabditis elegans DRM subunit LIN-54. We show that LIN-54 DNA-binding activity recruits DRM to promoters enriched for adjacent putative E2F/DP and LIN-54 binding sites, suggesting that these two DNA–binding moieties together direct DRM to its target genes. Chromatin immunoprecipitation and gene expression profiling reveals conserved roles for DRM in regulating genes involved in cell division, development, and reproduction. We find that LIN-54 promotes expression of reproduction genes in the germline, but prevents ectopic activation of germline-specific genes in embryonic soma. Strikingly, C. elegans DRM does not act uniformly throughout the genome: the DRM recruitment motif, DRM binding, and DRM-regulated embryonic genes are all under-represented on the X chromosome. However, germline genes down-regulated in lin-54 mutants are over-represented on the X chromosome. We discuss models for how loss of autosome-bound DRM may enhance germline X chromosome silencing. We propose that autosome-enriched binding of DRM arose in C. elegans as a consequence of germline X chromosome silencing and the evolutionary redistribution of germline-expressed and essential target genes to autosomes. Sex chromosome gene regulation may thus have profound evolutionary effects on genome organization and transcriptional regulatory networks.
Related Resources
Included in
Biology Commons, Cell and Developmental Biology Commons, Genetics and Genomics Commons, Medicine and Health Sciences Commons
Comments
Citation: Tabuchi TM, Deplancke B, Osato N, Zhu LJ, Barrasa MI, et al. (2011) Chromosome-Biased Binding and Gene Regulation by the Caenorhabditis elegans DRM Complex. PLoS Genet 7(5): e1002074. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002074. Link to article on publisher's website
Copyright: © 2011 Tabuchi et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.