Gene Transcription by Recruitment

An argument has been made that at many but not allgenes, transcriptional activators work by "recruitment"(for review, see Ptashne and Gann 1997). The role of aspecific activator, in this mechanism, is simply to "locate" the transcriptional machinery at a specific gene. According to this idea, repression could be effected by anyof several different mechanisms. In the following sections, we review recent experiments from our laboratorythat address various issues concerning the mechanism oftranscriptional activation and repression...