The mouse protocadherin (Pcdh) -α, -β, and -γ gene clusters encode more than 50 protein isoforms, the combinatorial expression of which generates vast single-cell diversity in the brain. At present, the mechanisms by which this diversity is expressed are not understood. Here we show that two transcriptional enhancer elements, HS5-1 and HS7, play a critical role in Pcdhα gene expression in mice....

Tumour necrosis factor á (TNFá) is a proinflammatory cytokine produced by activated macrophages, lymphocytes and other cells. The production of TNFá is under transcriptional and post-transcriptional control. Post-transcriptional control of TNFá expression is achieved by regulating translational initiation, mRNA stability, and polyadenylation. 7 10 An adenine and uridine (AU)-rich element (ARE) ...

Type I interferons elicit a number of biological responses by rapidly and transiently stimulating the transcriptional expression of a specific set of genes. The promoters of the inducible genes contain an enhancer element which is required for transcriptional activation. A specific oligonucleotide of 18 residues is sufficient for transcriptional induction when positioned in a heterologous promo...

CTP:phosphocholine cytidylyltransferase (CCT) is the rate-limiting and regulated enzyme of mammalian phosphatidylcholine biosynthesis. There are three isoforms, CCTalpha, CCTbeta1, and CCTbeta2. The mouse CCTalpha gene promoter is regulated by an enhancer element (Eb) located between -103 and -82 base pairs (5'-GTTTTCAGGAATGCGGAGGTGG-3') upstream from the transcriptional start site (Bakovic, M....

Expression of the DNA topoisomerase IIalpha (topoIIalpha) gene is highly sensitive to various environmental stimuli including heat shock. The amount of topoIIalpha mRNA was increased 1.5-3-fold 6-24 h after exposure of T24 human urinary bladder cancer cells to heat shock stress at 43 degreesC for 1 h. The effect of heat shock on the transcriptional activity of the human topoIIalpha gene promote...

Plant growth is regulated by a multiplicity of factors, many of which are transduced via hormone signaling. However, how these hormone signals converge to affect growth is not entirely clear (reviewed in Depuydt and Hardtke, 2011). New work from Ikeda et al. (2012) and Bai et al. (2012) demonstrates that the cell elongation component of growth is regulated by a mechanism involving groups of thr...

Dec2, a member of the basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) superfamily, has been shown to function as a transcriptional repressor and is implicated in cell proliferation and differentiation. In addition, Dec2 transcripts exhibit a striking circadian oscillation in the suprachiasmatic nucleus. To identify the molecular mechanisms by which Dec2 regulates gene expression, we carried out structure-functio...

The mechanistic interconnectivity between circadian regulation and the genotoxic stress response remains poorly understood. Here we show that the expression of Period 2 (Per2), a circadian regulator, is directly regulated by p53 binding to a response element in the Per2 promoter. This p53 response element is evolutionarily conserved and overlaps with the E-Box element critical for BMAL1/CLOCK b...

In many organisms, transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of components of pathways or processes has been reported. However, to date, there are few reports of translational co-regulation of multiple components of a developmental signaling pathway. Here, we show that an RNA element which we previously identified as a dorsal localization element (DLE) in the 3'UTR of zebrafish nodal-...