Article
- The EMBO Journal (2005) 24, 4154 - 4165
- doi:10.1038/sj.emboj.7600876
Published online: 24 November 2005
Subject Categories:
P-TEFb is not an essential elongation factor for the intronless human U2 snRNA and histone H2b genes
Joanne Medlin1, Andrew Scurry1, Alice Taylor1, Fan Zhang2,a, B Matija Peterlin2 and Shona Murphy1
- Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford, UK
- Departments of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, Rosalind Russell Medical Research Center, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Correspondence to:
Shona Murphy, Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3RE, UK. Tel.: +44 1865 275616; Fax: +44 1865 275556; E-mail: shona.murphy@path.ox.ac.uk
aPresent address: Baxter Laboratory in Genetic Pharmacology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, 269 Campus Drive, CCSR 3200, Stanford, CA 94305-5175, USA
Received 9 June 2005; Accepted 25 October 2005
Abstract
Phosphorylation of Ser2 of the heptapeptide repeat of the CTD of mammalian pol II by P-TEFb is associated with productive elongation of transcription of protein-coding genes. Here, we show that the CTD of pol II transcribing the human U2 snRNA genes is phosphorylated on Ser2 in vivo and that both the CDK9 kinase and cyclin T components of P-TEFb are required for cotranscriptional recognition of the 3' box RNA 3' end processing signal. However, inhibitors of CDK9 do not affect transcription of the U2 genes, indicating that P-TEFb functions exclusively as an RNA processing factor in expression of these relatively short, intronless genes. We also show that inhibition of CDK9 does not adversely affect either transcription of an intron-less, replication-activated histone H2b gene or recognition of the histone gene-specific U7-dependent RNA 3' end formation signal. These results emphasize that the role of P-TEFb as an activator of transcription elongation can be separated from its role in RNA processing and that neither function is universally required for expression of mammalian pol II-dependent genes.
Keywords:
- H2b,
- processing,
- P-TEFb,
- transcription,
- U2
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