Abstract
We determined the distribution of repressor-activator protein 1 (Rap1) and the accessory silencing proteins Sir2, Sir3 and Sir4 in vivo on the entire yeast genome, at a resolution of 2 kb. Rap1 is central to the cellular economy during rapid growth, targeting 294 loci, about 5% of yeast genes, and participating in the activation of 37% of all RNA polymerase II initiation events in exponentially growing cells. Although the DNA sequence recognized by Rap1 is found in both coding and intergenic sequences, the binding of Rap1 to the genome was highly specific to intergenic regions with the potential to act as promoters. This global phenomenon, which may be a general characteristic of sequence-specific transcriptional factors, indicates the existence of a genome-wide molecular mechanism for marking promoter regions.
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Acknowledgements
We thank V. Iyer for initiating work on the intergenic yeast array, and other members of the Brown and Botstein labs for advice and technical support. We thank D. Brutlag and J. Liu for advice in developing BioProspector, J. Derisi for software that maps the IP data, and J. Rine for yeast strains. This work was supported by a grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute and by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. P.O.B. is an associate investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation supports J.D.L.
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Web Figure H:
Download the .cdt, .gtr, and .pcl files corresponding to the cluster of gene expression profiles for the genes downstream of intergenic fragments selected by the Rap1p IP. These files must be loaded into Treeview to view the clusters. Instructions for using Treeview (http://rana.lbl.gov/EisenSoftware.htm) can be found in the Treview Manual.
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Lieb, J., Liu, X., Botstein, D. et al. Promoter-specific binding of Rap1 revealed by genome-wide maps of protein–DNA association. Nat Genet 28, 327–334 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng569
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng569