RNA binding and translational suppression by bicoid.
The anterior determinant bicoid (bcd) of Drosophila is a homeodomain protein. It forms an anterior-to-posterior gradient in the embryo and activates, in a concentration-dependent manner, several zygotic segmentation genes during blastoderm formation. Its posterior counterpart, the homeodomain transcription factor caudal (cad), forms a concentration gradient in the opposite direction, emanating from evenly distributed messenger RNA in the egg. In embryos lacking bcd activity as a result of mutation, the cad gradient fails to form and cad becomes evenly distributed throughout the embryo. This suggests that bcd may act in the region-specific control of cad mRNA translation. Here we report that bcd binds through its homeodomain to cad mRNA in vitro, and exerts translational control through a bcd- binding region of cad mRNA.[1]References
- RNA binding and translational suppression by bicoid. Rivera-Pomar, R., Niessing, D., Schmidt-Ott, U., Gehring, W.J., Jäckle, H. Nature (1996) [Pubmed]
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