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Welcome, everyone, to
this short talk series
on nuclear receptors
as therapeutic targets
and to Chapter 1 on
the roles, types,
and regulation of
transcription factors.
My name is Daniel Merk.
I'm a full professor and chair
at LMU Munich, in Germany,
and my research interests fully
focus on nuclear receptors,
so it's a pleasure to
introduce this topic to you.
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The ability of a living organism
to use genetic
information stored in DNA
to produce proteins with
various functions is
an essential part of life.
It involves the transcription
of genes on the DNA
to messenger RNA
and the subsequent translation
of mRNA to proteins.
A multicellular organism
could not develop
and work properly without tight
regulation of this process,
and this is where transcription
factors are essential
and come into play.
They play a key role in
the transcription-translation
process
by regulating what genes
are transcribed, and when,
from DNA to mRNA.
Transcription
factors are proteins
that interact with the DNA
and regulate its transcription
by various mechanisms.
Therein, transcription
factors recognize
specific DNA sequences
for binding,
which are termed
response elements,
and they can turn
genes on and off
and typically act as groups
in a complex network
to coordinate the genes
are properly expressed
according to
different cell types
and different
physiological situations.
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The activity of transcription
factors is tightly regulated
via various mechanisms
on transcriptional,
post-transcriptional, and
post-translational level.
These regulatory mechanisms
affect, for example,
the expression level and
the tertiary structure
of transcription factors
on transcription.
Mechanistically, this
regulation of transcription
by these factors involves
the recruitment of coregulators
that can either act as
co-activators or co-repressors.
Co-activators can, for example,
have histone
acetyltransferase activity
and open chromatin
for transcription,
whereas co-repressors can
act as histone deacetylases
and compact chromatin,
which represses transcription,
but there are also
many other mechanisms
for how the coregulators
attack transcription.
Hence, the role of
transcription factors
can be simplistically
described as
anchors on the DNA that
guide coregulators,
which in turn have epigenetic
regulator activity
or mediate recruitment of
the transcription complex.
Additionally,
transcription factors
can displace histones directly
or guide the binding of other
transcription factors to DNA
as further regulatory
mechanisms.
For these activities,
