Worm Breeder's Gazette 9(3): 68
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
Comparison of DNA sequences surrounding six C. tone genes reveals a novel conserved sequence located approximately 80 nucleotides upstream of the translational start site. The six genes include all of the genes in one genomic cluster (one of each of the four core histone genes), and two from another, unlinked cluster (one H2A gene and one H4 gene). All of the conserved sequences 5' of each of these genes are presented in the figure below. Starting at the ATG codon and moving upstream, they include a sequence adjacent to the translational initiation site typically found in eukaryotic mRNAs, a conserved sequence surrounding the transcriptional initiation site similar to one found in some sea urchin histone genes, a TATA box, and the novel sequence. With the exception of yeast, upstream consensus sequences in histone genes of other organisms are restricted to the genes for individual classes of histone proteins (i.e., they are H4 gene-specific or H2A gene-specific, etc.). In yeast a conserved sequence of 16 nucleotides activates transcription of histone genes in a cell cycle-dependent manner (Osley, M. H., Gould, J., Kim, 5., Kane, M. and Hereford, L. (1986) Cell 46, 537-544). Like the C. , this 16-mer is found upstream of different classes of histone-encoding genes. In the figure, numbering of nucleotides begins at the first translated nucleotide, and the number of non-matching nucleotides between each conserved region is given. The asterisk indicates the site of transcriptional initiation in two of the genes (+/- 1 nucleotide) determined from Sl mapping experiments. The arrow over the consensus transcriptional initiation sequence indicates the direction of transcription.