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Promoter elements associated with RNA Pol II stalling in the Drosophila embryo.

ABSTRACT: RNA Polymerase II (Pol II) is bound to the promoter regions of many or most developmental control genes before their activation during Drosophila embryogenesis. It has been suggested that Pol II stalling is used to produce dynamic and rapid responses of developmental patterning genes to transient cues such as extracellular signaling molecules. Here, we present a combined computational and experimental analysis of stalled promoters to determine how they come to bind Pol II in the early Drosophila embryo. At least one-fourth of the stalled promoters contain a shared sequence motif, the "pause button" (PB): KCGRWCG. The PB motif is sometimes located in the position of the DPE, and over one-fifth of the stalled promoters contain the following arrangement of core elements: GAGA, Inr, PB, and/or DPE. This arrangement was used to identify additional stalled promoters in the Drosophila genome, and permanganate footprint assays were used to confirm that the segmentation gene engrailed contains paused Pol II as seen for heat-shock genes. We discuss different models for Pol II binding and gene activation in the early embryo.

SUBMITTER: Hendrix DA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2396556 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Global analysis of short RNAs reveals widespread promoter-proximal stalling and arrest of Pol II in Drosophila.

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Project description:We developed a novel approach to isolate and characterize, at nucleotide-level resolution, the RNAs derived from RNA polymerase II (Pol II) in early elongation complexes. We find that high numbers of these short RNAs are not correlated with gene expression but instead are indicative of promoter-proximally stalled polymerase. High amounts of these short RNAs are generated from more than one third of all genes, indicating that Pol II stalls in the promoter-proximal region on global scale. We also find that the nucleotide composition of the initially transcribed sequence plays an important role in promoting transcriptional stalling and that early elongation complexes are highly susceptible to backtracking and arrest. Global analysis of RNAs produced by promoter-proximal Pol II.

2009-12-11 | E-GEOD-18643 | biostudies-arrayexpress

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The polycomb group mutant esc leads to augmented levels of paused Pol II in the Drosophila embryo.

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