Structural perspective of cooperative transcription factor binding.

In prokaryotes, individual transcription factors (TFs) can recognize long DNA motifs that are alone sufficient to define the genes that they induce or repress. In contrast, in higher organisms that have larger genomes, TFs recognize sequences that are too short to define unique genomic positions. In addition, development of multicellular organisms requires molecular systems that are capable of executing combinatorial logical operations. Co-operative recognition of DNA by multiple TFs allows both definition of unique genomic positions in large genomes, and complex information processing at the level of individual regulatory elements. The TFs can co-operate in multiple different ways, and the precise mechanism used for co-operation determines important features of the regulatory interactions. Here, we present an overview of the structural basis of the different mechanisms by which TFs can cooperate, focusing on insight from recent functional studies and structural analyses of specific TF-TF-DNA complexes.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Current Opinion in Structural Biology

• Publication date

  2017-12-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.sbi.2017.03.006PMID 28349863
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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