Transcriptional regulators: Protein-DNA complexes and regulatory mechanisms

Abstract

Processes such as DNA replication, transcription, and recombination involve the concerted action of diverse DNA-binding proteins acting on the DNA. Knowledge of the structure and working mechanisms of these nucleoprotein complexes has greatly improved since the 1980s, owing mainly to the appearance of a number of techniques that are relatively simple and give detailed information about the protein-DNA complexes. In this chapter we describe a number of these techniques that have been applied in the past years to study the switch from early to late transcription in Bacillus subtilis phage ~b29. We show the results obtained and describe how the techniques allowed us to elucidate the mechanism used by the transcriptional regulatory protein p4 to activate transcription from the viral late promoter.