The oncogenic potential of many nonacute retroviruses is dependent on the duplication of the enhancer sequences present in the unique 3' (U3) region of the long terminal repeat (LTR). In a molecular clone (MCF 247-W) of the murine leukemia virus MCF 247, a leukemogenic mink cell focus-inducing (MCF) virus, the U3 enhancer sequences are tandemly repeated in the LTR. We mutated the enhancer regio...

A distal transcriptional enhancer has been previously reported upstream of the mouse renin gene. A homologous sequence is also present upstream of the human renin gene, but the mouse and human renin enhancers differ markedly in their ability to activate transcription of a renin promoter. Although the 2 enhancers share high homology in their 202-bp promoter distal portions, their 40-bp proximal ...

The expression of the transcription factor gene Sox2 precisely marks the neural plate in various vertebrate species. We previously showed that the Sox2 expression prevailing in the neural plate of chicken embryos is actually regulated by the coordination of five phylogenetically conserved enhancers having discrete regional coverage, among which the 420-bp long enhancer N-1, active in the node-p...

We investigated alternate mechanisms employed by enhancers to position and remodel nucleosomes and activate tissue-specific genes in divergent cell types. We demonstrated that the granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) gene enhancer is modular and recruits different sets of transcription factors in T cells and myeloid cells. The enhancer recruited distinct inducible tissue-sp...

Tissue-specific enhancers are critical for gene regulation. In this study, we help elucidate the contribution of muscle-associated differential DNA methylation to the enhancer activity of highly muscle-specific genes. By bioinformatic analysis of 44 muscle-associated genes, we show that preferential gene expression in skeletal muscle (SkM) correlates with SkM-specific intragenic and intergenic ...

The dioxin-responsive enhancer upstream of the CYP1A1 gene contains four copies of the recognition motif for the liganded Ah receptor. The results of deletion analyses, linker-scanning analyses, and the analysis of individual enhancer subdomains reveal that each copy of the motif contributes to the response of the enhancer to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin. In the context of the dioxin-res...

Expression of mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV)-encoded superantigens in B lymphocytes is required for viral transmission and pathogenesis. We have previously established a critical role of an enhancer element within the long terminal repeat (LTR) for MMTV sag gene expression in B-lymphoid progenitor cells. We now demonstrate enhancer activity of this element in a promyelocytic progenitor cell l...

Identical genes in the same cellular environment are sometimes expressed differently. In some cases, including the immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) locus, this type of differential gene expression has been related to the absence of a transcriptional enhancer. To gain additional information on the role of the IgH enhancer, we examined expression driven by enhancers that were merely weakened, rat...

Regulation of both transcription and RNA splicing requires enhancer elements, that is, cis-acting DNA or RNA sequences that promote the activities of linked promoters or splice sites, respectively. Both types of enhancer associate with regulatory proteins to form multicomponent enhancer complexes that recruit the necessary enzymatic machinery to promoter or splice site recognition sequences. Th...

In addition to mediating sister chromatid cohesion during the cell cycle, the cohesin complex associates with CTCF and with active gene regulatory elements to form long-range interactions between its binding sites. Genome-wide chromosome conformation capture had shown that cohesin's main role in interphase genome organization is in mediating interactions within architectural chromosome compartm...