bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.18.423551; this version posted December 18, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Simple biochemical features underlie transcriptional activation domain diversity and dynamic, fuzzy binding to Mediator Adrian L. Sanborn,1,2,* Benjamin T. Yeh,2 Jordan T. Feigerle,1 Cynthia V. Hao,1 Raphael J. L. Townshend,2 Erez Lieberman Aiden,3,4 Ron O. Dror,2 Roger D. Kornberg1,*,+ 1Department of Structural Biology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 2Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 3The Center for Genome Architecture, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA 4Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Rice University, Houston, USA *Correspondence:
[email protected],
[email protected] +Lead Contact SUMMARY and Tjian, 1989). Instead, ADs were classified based on their enrichment of certain residues, whether acidic, glutamine- Gene activator proteins comprise distinct DNA-binding and rich, or proline-rich. transcriptional activation domains (ADs). Because few ADs Acidic ADs are the most common and best characterized. have been described, we tested domains tiling all yeast Acidic ADs retain activity when transferred between yeast transcription factors for activation in vivo and identified 150 and animals, pointing to a conserved eukaryotic mechanism ADs. By mRNA display, we showed that 73% of ADs bound the (Fischer et al., 1988; Struhl, 1988). While some have found Med15 subunit of Mediator, and that binding strength was that acidic residues are necessary for activation, others have correlated with activation.