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Distinct mechanisms for delimiting expression of four Caenorhabditis elegans transcription factor genes encoding activators or repressors

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Abstract

Regulatory transcription factors operate in networks, conferring biological robustness that makes dissection of such gene control processes difficult. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a powerful molecular genetic system that allows the close scrutiny needed to understand these processes in an animal, in vivo. Strikingly lower levels of gene expression were observed when a gfp reporter was inserted into C. elegans transcription factor genes, in their broader genomic context, in comparison to when the reporter was fused to just the promoter regions. The lower level of expression is more consistent with endogenous levels of the gene products, based on independent protein and transcript assays. Through successive precise manipulations of the reporter fusion genes, elements essential for the lower level of expression were localised to the protein-coding region. With a closer focus on four transcription factor genes, the expression of both genes encoding transcriptional activators was found to be restricted by a post-transcriptional mechanism while expression of both genes encoding transcriptional repressors was delimited by transcriptional repression. An element through which the transcriptional repression acts for unc-4 was localised to a 30 base-pair region of a protein-encoding exon, with potentially wider implications for how homeobox genes operate. The hypothesis that the distinction in mechanisms delimiting expression of the two types of transcription factor genes, as observed here, may apply more widely is raised. This leads to observations concerning the implications of these different mechanisms on stochastic noise in gene expression and the consequent significance for developmental decisions in general.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Mario de Bono for pDONP2P3-SL2-GFP, Alison Baker for pET28cGFP, Colin Dolphin for MW005, and Andrew Smith for technical assistance. We are grateful to Emese Prandovszky for technical suggestions concerning GFP quantification. Some strains used in this work were provided by the Caenorhabditis Genetics Centre, which is funded by the NIH National Centre for Research Resources (NCRR). This research was supported by BBSRC grant BB/E008038/1 and Wellcome Trust Grant 082603/B/07/Z. SB and IAH designed the experiments, SB and JW carried out the experiments, IAH supervised the project and SB and IAH wrote the manuscript.

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  1. Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, The University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

    Sophie Bamps, Julia Wirtz & Ian A. Hope

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  1. Sophie Bamps
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  2. Julia Wirtz
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  3. Ian A. Hope
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Correspondence to Ian A. Hope.

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Communicated by T. Ito.

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Bamps, S., Wirtz, J. & Hope, I.A. Distinct mechanisms for delimiting expression of four Caenorhabditis elegans transcription factor genes encoding activators or repressors. Mol Genet Genomics 286, 95–107 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-011-0630-3

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