%0 Journal Article
%T Novel RNA-binding properties of the MTG chromatin regulatory proteins
%A Stefano Rossetti
%A Leontine van Unen
%A Nicoletta Sacchi
%A Andre T Hoogeveen
%J BMC Molecular Biology
%D 2008
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2199-9-93
%X By using an RNA-binding assay based on synthetic RNA homopolymers and a panel of MTG deletion mutants, here we show that all the MTG proteins can bind RNA. The RNA-binding properties can be traced to two regions: the Zinc finger domains in the NHR4, which mediate Zinc-dependent RNA binding, and a novel short basic region (SBR) upstream of the NHR2, which mediates Zinc-independent RNA binding. The two AML1-MTG fusion proteins, retaining both the Zinc fingers domains and the SBR, also display RNA-binding properties.Evidence has been accumulating that RNA plays a role in transcriptional control. Both wild type MTGs and chimeric AML1-MTG proteins display in vitro RNA-binding properties, thus opening new perspectives on the possible involvement of an RNA component in MTG-mediated chromatin regulation.The myeloid translocation gene (MTG) protein family includes three human members: MTG8 (ETO/CBFA2T1) [1-3], MTGR1 (CBFA2T2) [4-6] and MTG16 (CBFA2T3) [7]. The MTG proteins share four conserved domains that can be traced to the Drosophila protein nervy, and therefore called nervy homology regions (NHR1-4) [6]. These domains carry information for distinct, but integrated, functional properties. The NHR1 domain can positively or negatively modulate transcription through interaction with either co-repressors or transcriptional activators [8]. The NHR2 domain is required for interaction with other MTG proteins and with the transcriptional co-repressor Sin3A [6,9-11]. The NHR4 domain, even if it contains two zinc finger (ZF) domains, does not mediate DNA-binding [12,13]; instead, it binds both co-repressor proteins, including N-CoR/SMRT, and histone deacetylases (HDACs) [11,14,15]. We and others showed that the MTG proteins can act as chromatin repressors due to their ability to recruit HDAC activity, either directly [10,11,16,17] or via the co-repressors N-CoR/SMRT and Sin3A [14,15,18]. Further, it has been demonstrated that both MTG8 and MTG16 can induce transcriptional repressi
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2199/9/93