Abstract
Heat shock factors (HSF) are the transcriptional activators of the heat shock response. The conversion of constitutively expressed HSF to a form that can bind DNA requires the trimerization of the protein, involving leucine zipper interactions as shown for yeast,Drosophila, chicken and human HSFs. Like other metazoan HSFs, the endogenousArabidopsis HSF displays heat shock-inducible DNA-binding activity in gel retardation assays. The heat shock-inducible binding of a recombinantArabidopsis HSF (ATHSF1) expressed inArabidopsis plants suggests that ATHSF1 is the major heat shock factor regulating the heat stress response. However, on transient expression inDrosophila and human cells, ATHSF1 fails to exhibit proper regulation, as demonstrated by constitutive binding to DNA, and by constitutive expression of a chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) reporter gene under the control of theDrosophila hsp70 promoter. These results suggest that the regulation of ATHSF1 is normally dependent on a specific factor that inhibits the DNA-binding and transcriptional activities under non-heat shock conditions.
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Hübel, A., Lee, J.H., Wu, C. et al. Arabidopsis heat shock factor is constitutively active inDrosophila and human cells. Molec. Gen. Genet. 248, 136–141 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02190794
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02190794