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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1986 May;83(10):3131–3135. doi: 10.1073/pnas.83.10.3131

The chicken delta 1-crystallin gene promoter: binding of transcription factor(s) to the upstream G+C-rich region is necessary for promoter function in vitro.

G C Das, J Piatigorsky
PMCID: PMC323466  PMID: 3010278

Abstract

There are two linked delta-crystallin genes in the chicken (5' delta 1-delta 2 3'). Only the delta 1 gene has been shown definitively to be active in the lens. Transcription of deletion mutants, reported here, shows that the sequences necessary for the functioning of the delta 1 promoter in a HeLa cell extract are located upstream from the RNA initiation site, between nucleotide positions -121 and -38. This region includes a number of G+C-rich motifs, including one hexanucleotide sequence, CCGCCC, that is repeated six times in the simian virus 40 (SV40) promoter. Competition experiments with purified fragments from the delta 1-crystallin gene promoter showed that binding of transcription factor(s) from the HeLa cell extract to this G+C-rich region is required for promoter activity in vitro. Further, competition experiments using three different fragments from the SV40 promoter suggest that the transcription factor(s) is similar to Sp1, which stimulates transcription by binding to the G+C-rich 21-base-pair repeats of the SV40 promoter, and differs from that which interacts with the SV40 enhancer region.

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Selected References

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