Protein-DNA interactions in extremophiles.

ARIEL APTEKMANN; A NADRA

Villa Carlos Paz, Cordoba, Argentina.

Congreso; XLII Reunion Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Biofisica; 2013

Sociedad Argentina de Biofisica

Protein-DNA interactions are central to cell activity regulation including transcription initiation. The TATA box binding protein (TBP) is involved in promoter recognition, the first step of transcription initiation. TBP is universally conserved and essential in archaea and eukaryotes. In archaea, TBPs have to be stable and to function in species that cover an extremely wide range of optimal growth temperatures (OGTs), from below 0 °C to more than 100 °C. Thus, the archaeal TBP family is ideally suited to study the evolutionary adaptation of proteins to an extremely wide range of temperatures(1). We expect TBP and TATA box to coevolve responding to a number of factors, adaptation to temperature, pressure, salinity, and other extreme physico chemical conditions. We characterized the TATA box for different archeal phylum in terms of length, base composition, information content, and analized its relation with OGT, wich is predicted to have an effect in those traits by Schneider´s molecular information theory(2).