Enhancer control of transcriptional bursting. Center for Developmental Biology

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Category	Seminar
Date and Time	2016-08-02 16:00 - 17:30
Venue	Seminar Room A7F
Speaker	Takashi Fukaya
Affiliation	HFSP fellow, Princeton University
Title	Enhancer control of transcriptional bursting.
Poster	click here to download(PDF)
Host	Sa-Kan Yoo
Summary	Transcription is episodic, consisting of a series of discontinuous bursts. Using live-imaging methods and quantitative analysis, we examine transcriptional bursting in living Drosophila embryos. Different developmental enhancers positioned downstream of synthetic reporter genes produce transcriptional bursts with similar amplitudes and duration but generate very different bursting frequencies, with strong enhancers producing more bursts than weak enhancers. Insertion of an insulator reduces the number of bursts and the corresponding level of gene expression, suggesting that enhancer regulation of bursting frequency is a key parameter of gene control in development. We also show that linked reporter genes exhibit coordinated bursting profiles when regulated by a shared enhancer, challenging conventional models of enhancer-promoter looping. Reference: Fukaya et al. 2016 Cell 166 (2), 358-368