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The electronic form of this document may be cited in the following style:
Human Genome Program, U.S. Department of Energy, DOE Human Genome Program Contractor-Grantee Workshop IV, 1994.

Abstracts scanned from text submitted for November 1994 DOE Human Genome Program Contractor-Grantee Workshop. Inaccuracies have not been corrected.

NONCANONICAL OCTANUCLEOTIDE SEQUENCES RECOGNIZED WITH THE POU DOMAIN OF OCT-2B FACTOR

Alexander G. Stepchenko, N.N.Luchina and Oleg L. Polanovsky
Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology; Russian Academy of Sciences; Moscow 117984, Russia.

The Oct proteins belong to the important class of transcription factors involved in the tissue specific gene expression, cell differentiation and development. All these factors contain a POU domain recognizing a conservative oct sequence ATGCAAAT in the regulatory regions of target genes.

With a random modification method it was shown [1] that noncanonical sequences are targets for mouse POU domain, Oct-1 and Oct-2B transcription factors. These sequences were subdivided into two groups: one group containing octanucleotide related sequences, and the other group having tetranucleotide TAAT. The methylation interference assay was used to establish what nucleotides of target sequences are in contact with the POU domain. This analysis revealed that the core (6-7 bp) of octamer related sequences was essential for protein/DNA interaction. In the second group of target sequences the nucleotides recognized with the POU domain may be separated with a spacer (up to 4 bp) [1, 2]. From obtained data follows that POU domain interacts with some targets as an entire entity and with others "homeo" type interaction is prevalent.

Our results indicate that the Oct proteins interact with canonical octanucleotide and partially degenerated oct-sequences. These data have greatly increased the number of potential targets for Oct proteins on DNA and changed our view on the gene expression regulation by these protein factors.

This work was funded by the DOE Genome Program, A.S. and N.L.were supported by the Human Genome Program (Russia).

[1] Stepchenko A.G. (1994) Noncanonical oct-sequences are targets for mouse Oct-2b transcription factor. FEBS Letters, 337, 175-178.
[2] Stepchenko A.G., and Polanovsky O.L. (1994) Oct-Proteins/DNA interactions. Submitted manuscript.