New Publication: Sreejith Nair, PhD
Posted in Cancer Cell Biology Program News
Date Posted: August 12, 2022
Transcriptional Enhancers at 40: Evolution of a Viral DNA Element to Nuclear Architectural Structures
Sreejith J Nair, Tom Suter, Susan Wang, Lu Yang, Feng Yang, Michael G Rosenfeld
Trends in Genetics. 2022 Jul 7; S0168-9525(22)00141-X. doi: 10.1016/j.tig.2022.05.015.
Abstract
Gene regulation by transcriptional enhancers is the dominant mechanism driving cell type- and signal-specific transcriptional diversity in metazoans. However, over four decades since the original discovery, how enhancers operate in the nuclear space remains largely enigmatic. Recent multidisciplinary efforts combining real-time imaging, genome sequencing, and biophysical strategies provide insightful but conflicting models of enhancer-mediated gene control. Here, we review the discovery and progress in enhancer biology, emphasizing the recent findings that acutely activated enhancers assemble regulatory machinery as mesoscale architectural structures with distinct physical properties. These findings help formulate novel models that explain several mysterious features of the assembly of transcriptional enhancers and the mechanisms of spatial control of gene expression.