Cohabitation of scaffold binding regions with upstream/enhancer elements of three developmentally regulated genes of D. melanogaster

Abstract

We find DNA fragments attached to the nuclear scaffold (SARs) both 5' and 3' of three Drosophila genes, defining looped domains ranging from 4.5 to 13 kb. For the two-promoter-containing gene Adh (alcohol dehydrogenase), we find two upstream and two downstream SARs. For Sgs-4, the 5' SAR covers 866 bp immediately upstream of the transcript, and in the case of fushi tarazu, the 5' SAR is found on a small fragment 4.8 kb upstream of the start of transcription. These four upstream scaffold-attached fragments comap with enhancer-like regulatory sequences. Sequence analysis of five upstream SARs reveals clusters of sequences closely related to the cleavage consensus of topoisomerase II, several copies of a specific 10 bp A-rich sequence (AATAAATCAAA), and another 10 bp T-rich stretch.