How affinity of the ELT-2 GATA factor binding to cis-acting regulatory sites controls Caenorhabditis elegans intestinal gene transcription.

ABSTRACT: We define a quantitative relationship between the affinity with which the intestine-specific GATA factor ELT-2 binds to cis-acting regulatory motifs and the resulting transcription of asp-1, a target gene representative of genes involved in Caenorhabditis elegans intestine differentiation. By establishing an experimental system that allows unknown parameters (e.g. the influence of chromatin) to effectively cancel out, we show that levels of asp-1 transcripts increase monotonically with increasing binding affinity of ELT-2 to variant promoter TGATAA sites. The shape of the response curve reveals that the product of the unbound ELT-2 concentration in vivo [i.e. (ELT-2_free) or ELT-2 'activity'] and the largest ELT-XXTGATAAXX association constant (

SUBMITTER: Lancaster BR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7390640 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature