The bacteriophage 434 operator/repressor system in yeast

Abstract

The ability of the bacteriophage 434 operator/repressor system to function in a eukaryotic cell has been explored. An idealized 434 operator was placed at various positions in the PGK promoter of Saccharomyces cerevisiae: within the upstream activator sequence, close to the TATA box, and downstream of the transcription-initiation site. Expression of the 434 cI gene from a 2 microns-based plasmid resulted in significant repression of gene expression from constructs containing the altered promoters linked to a beta-galactosidase reporter gene. Attempts to use a variant of the 434 repressor that has the binding specificity of the P22 repressor (434P22) were unsuccessful, due to a severely inhibitory effect of this gene-product on the growth of the yeast cells.