B.F. Pugh, R. Tjian, "Mechanism of transcriptional activation by Sp1: evidence for coactivators," Cell, 61:1187-97, 1990.
Franklin Pugh (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Berkeley): "The story of eukaryotic transcriptional coactivators has provoked a new way of thinking about how sequence-specific activators communicate with the basal transcriptional machinery.
"The prevailing thought prior to this work was that the TFIID component of this machine was a single protein that was targeted directly by activators. Purified recombinant yeast TFIID seemed to fit the bill because it was a single polypeptide that bound to the TATA box and reconstituted the basal transcription machinery.
"There was one problem with this idea, however. Neither this yeast TATA-binding protein nor its homologs cloned from flies and humans would allow activators to communicate with the basal transcription machinery and activate transcription.
Apparently, there was more to the natural TFIID, namely coactivators, than was contained in the ...
