Site-specific acetylation of histone H4 by MOF is central to establishing the hyperactive male X chromosome in Drosophila. MOF belongs to the MYST family of histone acetyltransferases (HATs) characterized by an unusual C2HC-type zinc finger close to their HAT domains. The function of these rare zinc fingers is unknown. We found that this domain is essential for HAT activity, in addition to the ...

Zac is a C(2)H(2) zinc finger protein that regulates apoptosis and cell cycle arrest through DNA binding and transactivation. The coactivator proteins p300/CBP enhance transactivation through their histone acetyltransferase (HAT) activity by modulating chromatin structure. Here, we show that p300 increases Zac transactivation in a strictly HAT-dependent manner. Whereas the classic recruitment m...

HIV-1 Tat is able to form a ternary complex with P/CAF and p300 and increase the affinity for CDK9/P-TEFb CTD kinase complex. Our previous study demonstrated that Tat binds to p300/CBP in the minimal HAT domain (aa 1253-1790) and that the interaction results in a change of conformation on p300/CBP. Here, we show that the Tat-p300 interaction increases the HAT activity of p300 on histone H4 that...

Transcriptional repression of the silent mating-type loci HMLalpha and HMRa in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is regulated by chromatin structure. Sas2p is a catalytic subunit of the SAS histone acetyltransferase (HAT) complex. Although many HATs seem to relieve chromosomal repression to facilitate transcriptional activation, sas mutant phenotypes include loss of SIR1-dependent silencing of HMLalpha....

BACKGROUND Histone acetylation of chromatin plays a key role in promoting the dynamic transcriptional responses in neurons that influence the neuroplasticity linked to cognitive ability, yet the specific histone acetyltransferases (HATs) that create such epigenetic marks remain to be elucidated. METHODS AND FINDINGS Here we use the Drosophila neuromuscular junction (NMJ) as a well-characteriz...

JCB • VOLUME 203 • NUMBER 3 • 2013 378 W hat can you learn about a cell just by looking at it? Quite a lot, as it turns out. A cell’s shape can tell you about its behavior and its function in the body, just for a start. And, as Chris Bakal can attest, a cell’s shape can also tell you a lot about the signaling pathways at work. Bakal has been interested in cellular signaling pathways ever since ...

The stabilization of learned information into long-term memories requires new gene expression. CREB binding protein (CBP) is a coactivator of transcription that can be independently regulated in neurons. CBP functions both as a platform for recruiting other required components of the transcriptional machinery and as a histone acetyltransferase (HAT) that alters chromatin structure. To dissect t...

the pseudo-elastic behavior of shape memory alloy (sma) truss and cantilever beam are investigated. brinson’s one-dimensional material model, which uses the twinned and detwinned martensite fractions separately as internal variables, is applied in the algorithm to establish the sma stress-strain characteristics. this material model also incorporates different young’s modulus for austenitic and ...