Molecular Cell
Volume 72, Issue 4, 15 November 2018, Pages 687-699.e6
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Article
Spt6 Is Required for the Fidelity of Promoter Selection

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2018.09.005Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Upon depletion of Spt6, thousands of intragenic promoters are activated

  • Sequence features plus altered chromatin structure likely lead to this activation

  • Spt6 depletion also causes decreased expression of most genic promoters

  • This decrease in expression likely results from competition for initiation factors

Summary

Spt6 is a conserved factor that controls transcription and chromatin structure across the genome. Although Spt6 is viewed as an elongation factor, spt6 mutations in Saccharomyces cerevisiae allow elevated levels of transcripts from within coding regions, suggesting that Spt6 also controls initiation. To address the requirements for Spt6 in transcription and chromatin structure, we have combined four genome-wide approaches. Our results demonstrate that Spt6 represses transcription initiation at thousands of intragenic promoters. We characterize these intragenic promoters and find sequence features conserved with genic promoters. Finally, we show that Spt6 also regulates transcription initiation at most genic promoters and propose a model of initiation site competition to account for this. Together, our results demonstrate that Spt6 controls the fidelity of transcription initiation throughout the genome.

Keywords

Spt6
transcription start sites
intragenic promoters
chromatin structure

Cited by (0)

3

Present address: Biomedical Center Munich, Department of Physiological Chemistry, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Planegg-Martinsried, Germany

4

These authors contributed equally

5

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