The TAF9 C-Terminal Conserved Region Domain Is Required for SAGA and TFIID Promoter Occupancy To Promote Transcriptional Activation

Abstract

A common function of the TFIID and SAGA complexes, which are recruited by transcriptional activators, is to deliver TBP to promoters to stimulate transcription. Neither the relative contributions of the five shared TBP-associated factor (TAF) subunits in TFIID and SAGA nor the requirement for different domains in shared TAFs for transcriptional activation is well understood. In this study, we uncovered the essential requirement for the highly conserved C-terminal region (CRD) of Taf9, a shared TAF, for transcriptional activation in yeast. Transcriptome profiling performed under Gcn4-activating conditions showed that the Taf9 CRD is required for induced expression of ∼9% of the yeast genome. The CRD was not essential for the Taf9-Taf6 interaction, TFIID or SAGA integrity, or Gcn4 interaction with SAGA in cell extracts. Microarray profiling of a SAGA mutant (spt20Δ) yielded a common set of genes induced by Spt20 and the Taf9 CRD. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays showed that, although the Taf9 CRD mutation did not impair Gcn4 occupancy, the occupancies of TFIID, SAGA, and the preinitiation complex were severely impaired at several promoters. These results suggest a crucial role for the Taf9 CRD in genome-wide transcription and highlight the importance of conserved domains, other than histone fold domains, as a common determinant for TFIID and SAGA functions.

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Correction for Saint et al., “The TAF9 C-Terminal Conserved Region Domain Is Required for SAGA and TFIID Promoter Occupancy To Promote Transcriptional Activation”

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/MCB.01060-13.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Alan Hinnebusch (National Institutes of Health), Jerry Workman (Stowers Institute of Medical Research), Tetsuro Kokubo (Yokohama City University, Japan), Tony Weil (Vanderbilt University), Steven Buratowski (Harvard Medical School), and Shelley Berger (University of Pennsylvania) for providing antibodies and strains; Jayasha Shandilya for carrying out the initial genetic screen; Jerry Workman, Alan Hinnebusch, and Swami Venkatesh for discussions and comments on the manuscript; Genotypic Technologies, Bangalore, India, for microarray hybridizations; and Jeffrey Townsend (Yale University) and Rashi Gupta for advice on BAGEL analysis.

M.S., I.S., R.P.S., and R.D. were supported by Junior and Senior Research Fellowships from CSIR; S.S. was supported by a Senior Research Fellowship from ICMR. R.S. acknowledges support from the PRISM project at IMSc, funded by DAE, Government of India. This work was funded by a research grant from CSIR, by partial support under DST-PURSE, by UPOE, and by UGC-RNW grants to K.N.

R.D. performed all experiments during revision of the manuscript.