The union of transcription and mRNA processing: 20 years of coupling
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, Colorado 80045, USA
- Corresponding author: david.bentley{at}ucdenver.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Twenty years ago the communities studying eukaryotic transcription and mRNA processing were pretty segregated and seemed happy for the most part to attend their respective Cold Spring Harbor meetings in blissful ignorance of one another. Transcription people, myself included, were content not to concern ourselves with how a spliceosome worked, and equally, I imagine, RNA processing people were not too concerned about how an RNA polymerase II (pol II) transcription complex was put together. My blinkered perspective began to open up on the day of our lab's Christmas lunch in 1995. That morning Nova Fong showed me a freshly developed RNAse protection assay (RPA) to look at processing of the poly(A) site on transcripts made by a mutant form of pol II that lacked the C-terminal domain (CTD). This enigmatic, highly conserved domain on the polymerase large subunit comprises 52 tandem heptad repeats (consensus YSPTSPS). It was co-discovered by Jeff …
