HEAT-SHOCK ELEMENT ARCHITECTURE IS AN IMPORTANT DETERMINANT IN THE TEMPERATURE AND TRANSACTIVATION DOMAIN REQUIREMENTS FOR HEAT-SHOCK TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR
N. Santoro et al., HEAT-SHOCK ELEMENT ARCHITECTURE IS AN IMPORTANT DETERMINANT IN THE TEMPERATURE AND TRANSACTIVATION DOMAIN REQUIREMENTS FOR HEAT-SHOCK TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR, Molecular and cellular biology (Print), 18(11), 1998, pp. 6340-6352
The baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae possesses a single gene enc
oding heat shock transcription factor (HSF), which is required for the
activation of genes that participate in stress protection as well as
normal growth and viability. Yeast HSF (yHSF) contains two distinct tr
anscriptional activation regions located at the amino and carboxyl ter
mini, Activation of the yeast metallothionein gene, CUP1, depends on a
nonconsensus heat shock element (HSF), occurs at higher temperatures
than other heat shock-responsive genes, and is highly dependent on the
carboxyl-terminal transactivation domain (CTA) of yHSF, The results d
escribed here show that the noncanonical (or gapped) spacing of GAA un
its in the CUP1 HSE (HSE1) functions to limit the magnitude of CUP1 tr
anscriptional activation in response to heat and oxidative stress. The
spacing in HSE1 modulates the dependence for transcriptional activati
on by both stresses on the yHSF CTA. Furthermore, a previously unchara
cterized HSF in the CUP1 promoter, HSE2, modulates the magnitude of th
e transcriptional activation of CUP1, via HSE1, in response to stress.
In vitro DNase I footprinting experiments suggest that the occupation
of HSE2 by yHSF strongly influences the manner in which yHSF occupies
HSE1. Limited proteolysis assays show that HSF adopts a distinct prot
ease-sensitive conformation when bound to the CUP1 HSE1, providing evi
dence that the HSE influences DNA-bound HSF conformation. Together, th
ese results suggest that CUP1 regulation is distinct from that of othe
r classic heat shock genes through the interaction of yHSF with two no
nconsensus HSEs, Consistent with this view, we have identified other g
ene targets of yHSF containing HSEs with sequence and spacing features
similar to those of CUP1 HSE1 and show a correlation between the spac
ing of the GAA units and the relative dependence on the yHSF CTA.