High activity of a broad panel of housekeeping and tissue-specific cis-regulatory elements depends on a subset of ETS proteins

The genomic repertoire of enhancers and promoters that control the transcriptional output of terminally differentiated cells includes cell type-specific and housekeeping elements. Whether the constitutive activity of these two groups of cis-regulatory elements relies on entirely distinct or instead shared regulators is unknown. By dissecting the cis-regulatory repertoire of macrophages, we found that the ELF subfamily of ETS proteins selectively bound within 60 bp from the transcription start sites of highly active housekeeping genes. ELFs also bound constitutively active, but not poised macrophage-specific enhancers and promoters. The role of ELFs in promoting constitutive transcription is suggested by multiple evidences: ELF sites enabled transcriptional activation by endogenous and minimal synthetic promoters; ELF recruitment was stabilized by the transcriptional machinery, and ELF proteins mediated recruitment of transcriptional and chromatin regulators to core promoters. These data indicate that a distinct subfamily of ETS proteins imparts high transcriptional activity to a broad range of housekeeping and tissue-specific cis-regulatory elements, which is consistent with the role of an ETS family ancestor in core promoter regulation in a lower eukaryote. Overall design: Nascent RNA sequencing of primary bone marrow-derived macrophages (BMDM) This series contains a re-analysis of GSM1880858 from GSE73021. The file MacroTFs_171-genes.fpkm_tracking.gz contains the FPKM values for this sample.

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Curina A, Termanini A, Barozzi I, Prosperini E, Simonatto M, Polletti S, Silvola A, Soldi M, Austenaa L, Bonaldi T, Ghisletti S, Natoli G