The CLAMP protein links the MSL complex to the X chromosome during Drosophila dosage compensation
- Marcela M.L. Soruco1,8,
- Jessica Chery1,8,
- Eric P. Bishop2,3,8,
- Trevor Siggers4,
- Michael Y. Tolstorukov2,4,
- Alexander R. Leydon1,
- Arthur U. Sugden1,
- Karen Goebel1,
- Jessica Feng1,
- Peng Xia1,
- Anastasia Vedenko3,
- Martha L. Bulyk4,5,6,
- Peter J. Park2,4,7 and
- Erica Larschan1,9
- 1Department of Molecular Biology, Cellular Biology, and Biochemistry, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA;
- 2Center for Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA;
- 3Bioinformatics Graduate Program, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA;
- 4Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA;
- 5Department of Pathology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA;
- 6Harvard University-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA;
- 7Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
-
↵8 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
The Drosophila male-specific lethal (MSL) dosage compensation complex increases transcript levels on the single male X chromosome to equal the transcript levels in XX females. However, it is not known how the MSL complex is linked to its DNA recognition elements, the critical first step in dosage compensation. Here, we demonstrate that a previously uncharacterized zinc finger protein, CLAMP (chromatin-linked adaptor for MSL proteins), functions as the first link between the MSL complex and the X chromosome. CLAMP directly binds to the MSL complex DNA recognition elements and is required for the recruitment of the MSL complex. The discovery of CLAMP identifies a key factor required for the chromosome-specific targeting of dosage compensation, providing new insights into how subnuclear domains of coordinate gene regulation are formed within metazoan genomes.
Keywords
Footnotes
-
↵9 Corresponding author
E-mail erica_larschan{at}brown.edu
-
Supplemental material is available for this article.
-
Article is online at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.214585.113.
- Received January 28, 2013.
- Accepted June 12, 2013.
- Copyright © 2013 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
