Enhancers lie at the heart of transcriptional and developmental gene regulation. Therefore, changes in enhancer sequences usually disrupt the target gene expression and result in disease phenotypes. Despite the well-established role of enhancers in development and disease, evolutionary sequence studies are lacking. The current study attempts to unravel the puzzle of bony vertebrates' conserved ...

The protein sigma 54 associates with Escherichia coli core RNA polymerase to form a holoenzyme that binds promoters but is inactive in the absence of enhancer activation. Here, mutants of sigma 54 enabled polymerases to transcribe without enhancer protein and adenosine triphosphate. The mutations are in leucines within the NH2-terminal glutamine-rich domain of sigma 54. Multiple leucine substit...

Salinity is a major abiotic stress that affects plant growth and productivity. To cope with salt stress, plants express large number of responsive genes proteins are involved in wide range cellular functions. In the present study, halophytic Suaeda maritima (L.) Dumort. were hydroponically exposed to NaCl for understanding molecular mechanisms behind salinity tolerance using PCR-based Suppressi...

Transcription of the herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) immediate early (IE) genes is determined by multiprotein enhancer complexes. The core enhancer assembly requires the interactions of the POU-homeodomain protein Oct-1, the viral transactivator alphaTIF and the cellular factor C1 (HCF). In this context, the C1 factor interacts with each protein to assemble the stable enhancer complex. In additi...

A recent study visualizes nascent RNAs in live Drosophila embryos to establish a connection between enhancer strength and the frequency of transcriptional bursts. Interestingly, one enhancer can simultaneously activate two core promoters, challenging models of enhancer-core-promoter communication via direct protein-protein contacts.

There is widespread interest today in understanding enhancers, which are regulatory elements typically harboring several transcription factor binding sites and mediating the combinatorial effect of transcription factors on gene expression. The evolution of enhancers poses interesting unanswered questions, for example, the evolutionary time taken for a typical enhancer to emerge or the factors s...