Ubiquitous transcription factors display structural plasticity and diverse functions: NusG proteins - Shifting shapes and paradigms.

ABSTRACT: Numerous accessory factors modulate RNA polymerase response to regulatory signals and cellular cues and establish communications with co-transcriptional RNA processing. Transcription regulators are astonishingly diverse, with similar mechanisms arising via convergent evolution. NusG/Spt5 elongation factors comprise the only universally conserved and ancient family of regulators. They bind to the conserved clamp helices domain of RNA polymerase, which also interacts with non-homologous initiation factors in all domains of life, and reach across the DNA channel to form processivity clamps that enable uninterrupted RNA chain synthesis. In addition to this ubiquitous function, NusG homologs exert diverse, and sometimes opposite, effects on gene expression by competing with each other and other

SUBMITTER: NandyMazumdar M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4334689 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature