RNA polymerase II stalling loading at the start prepares genes for a sprint 英文参考文献.docVIP

Review RNA polymerase II stalling: loading at the start prepares genes for a sprint Jia Qian Wu* and Michael Snyder*? Addresses: *Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Department, and ?Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department, Yale University, PO Box 208103, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. Correspondence: Michael Snyder. Email: Michael.Snyder@ Published: 2 May 2008 Genome Biology 2008, 9:220 (doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-5-220) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2008/9/5/220 ? 2008 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract Stalling of RNA polymerase II near the promoter has recently been found to be much more common than previously thought. Genome-wide surveys of the phenomenon suggest that it is likely to be a rate-limiting control on gene activation that poises developmental and stimulus-responsive genes for prompt expression when inducing signals are received. The recruitment of RNA polymerase II (Pol II) to the promoter has been generally believed to be the rate-limiting step in gene activation [1]. However, a series of discoveries made since the mid-1980s, combined with recent genome- wide studies, suggest that many developmental and induci- ble Drosophila and mammalian genes, prior to their expres- sion, contain Pol II bound predominantly in their promoter proximal regions in a ‘stalled’ state [1-8]. Activation of the stalled polymerase is thought to be responsible for the expression of these genes [1]. Although initial studies revealed that Pol II stalling is present on several genes, it has recently been found that Pol II stalling is more common than previously thought [13-16]. Technologies such as ChIP-chip (chromatin immunoprecipi- tation in combination with genomic DNA microarrays) allow transcriptional regulation to be examined genome wide [17,18]. Through the ENCODE (Encyclopedia