Bicoid associates with the 5′-cap-bound complex of caudal mRNA and represses translation

  1. Dierk Niessing1,2,3,
  2. Stephen Blanke1,3, and
  3. Herbert Jäckle1,4
  1. 1Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie, Abteilung Molekulare Entwicklungsbiologie, 37077 Göttingen, Germany; 2The Rockefeller University, Laboratories of Molecular Biophysics, New York, New York 10021, USA

Abstract

Translational control plays a key role in many biological processes including pattern formation during early Drosophilaembryogenesis. In this process, the anterior determinant Bicoid (BCD) acts not only as a transcriptional activator of segmentation genes but also causes specific translational repression of ubiquitously distributed caudal (cad) mRNA in the anterior region of the embryo. We show that translational repression of cad mRNA is dependent on a functional eIF4E-binding motif. The results suggest a novel mode of translational repression, which combines the strategy of target-specific binding to 3′-untranslated sequences and interference with 5′-cap-dependent translation initiation in one protein.

Keywords

Footnotes

  • 3 These authors contributed equally to this work.

  • 4 Corresponding author.

  • E-MAIL hjaeckl{at}gwdg.de; FAX 49-551-201-1755.

  • Article and publication are at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.240002.

    • Received March 6, 2002.
    • Accepted July 29, 2002.
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