Hormone withdrawal triggers a premature and sustained gene activation from delayed secondary glucocorticoid response elements.

Glucocorticoid regulatory elements, denoted GREs and delayed secondary GREs (sGREs), bind the purified glucocorticoid receptors via distinctive sequence motifs and confer a primary and delayed secondary hormone inducibility, respectively, upon a linked reporter construct in stably transfected mammalian cells. The delayed secondary responses, but not the primary responses, are preceded by a time lag of several hours and blocked by protein synthesis inhibitors. In this report, we further characterized and distinguished these hormonal inductions. A 206-base pair DNA fragment from the hepatic rat alpha 2u-globulin (RUG) gene, containing at least two delayed sGREs, was specifically activated by glucocorticoids in a dose-dependent manner via a process which is sensitive to receptor antagonist RU486. Delayed sGRE-stimulated production of correctly initiated transcripts was preceded by a time lag of 2 h, a time when the GRE-mediated induction had reached maximal levels. A pulse of glucocorticoids sustained maximal activation of the delayed secondary response but not the primary response. In fact, hormone withdrawal triggered a premature induction of this delayed secondary response, suggesting that delayed sGREs are under both negative and positive control of the hormone receptor. Two separable elements of the 206-base pair fragment, including the 29-base pair sequence of a single receptor binding site, activated the reporter expression as effectively with transient, pulsatile exposure to hormone as with continuous exposure. Our results suggest that the information content of a hormonal pulse is retained, or "memorized," more persistently by a receptor binding site of delayed sGREs than those of the prototypical GREs.