title: Donor Preference Meets Heterochromatin: Moonlighting Activities of a Recombinational Enhancer in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
abstract: In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a small, intergenic region known as the recombination enhancer regulates donor selection during mating-type switching and also helps shape the conformation of chromosome III. Using an assay that detects transient losses of heterochromatic repression, we found that the recombination enhancer also acts at a distance in cis to modify the stability of gene silencing. In a mating-type-specific manner, the recombination enhancer destabilized the heterochromatic repression of a gene located ∼17 kbp away. This effect depended on a subregion of the recombination enhancer that is largely sufficient to determine donor preference. Therefore, this subregion affects both recombination and transcription from a distance. These observations identify a rare example of long-range transcriptional regulation in yeast and raise the question of whether other cis elements also mediate dual effects on recombination and gene expression.
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-3220.
authors.forename: Anne E
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-7719-0496
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Dodson
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-3220 jrine@berkeley.edu.
authors.forename: Jasper
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2297-9814
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rine
mesh_terms: D004742:Enhancer Elements, Genetic; D015966:Gene Expression Regulation, Fungal; D020868:Gene Silencing; D049770:Genes, Mating Type, Fungal; D006570:Heterochromatin / Q000235:genetics*; D051548:Histone Acetyltransferases / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D011995:Recombination, Genetic; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000235:genetics*; D029701:Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D006570:Heterochromatin; D029701:Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins; D051548:Histone Acetyltransferases; C469266:Sas2 protein, S cerevisiae
keywords: Sas2; long-range regulation; mating-type switching; silencing