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Promoting FOS to an enhanced position

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 1291–1293 (2014)Cite this article

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How do enhancers facilitate transcription of plasticity-related genes in response to synaptic stimulation? A study implicates a specific histone modification and suggests that FOS regulates enhancer function.

In contrast with promoters, which are short, well-defined DNA sequences located immediately upstream of target genes' transcriptional start sites, enhancers are poorly understood stretches of DNA. Enhancers can be located some distance away from the genes, some as far as hundreds or thousands of base pairs away from the transcription start sites, and generally lack well-defined DNA motifs. This can make it difficult to identify and study enhancers and their functions. Luckily, post-translational modifications to histone proteins are providing a Rosetta Stone that is enabling us to identify and characterize functional elements in the genome, including enhancers. In this issue of Nature Neuroscience, Malik et al.1 identify a histone modification that shows remarkable fidelity for identifying enhancers that regulate activity-dependent gene transcription in neurons. Surprisingly, their data also suggest that the transcription factor FOS controls activity-dependent gene expression by binding to similar sites in gene enhancers.

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Figure 1: Identifying active neuronal enhancers.

Debbie Maizels/Nature Publishing Group

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Affiliations

  1. Sietse Jonkman and Paul J. Kenny are in the Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA.

    Sietse Jonkman & Paul J Kenny

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  1. Sietse Jonkman
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  2. Paul J Kenny
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Correspondence to Paul J Kenny.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Jonkman, S., Kenny, P. Promoting FOS to an enhanced position. Nat Neurosci 17, 1291–1293 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3819

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