Evolutionarily conserved C-terminal region of TAF9 is critical for SAGA and TFIID recruitment to promoters and transcriptional activation

TFIID and SAGA complexes play a critical role in RNA Polymerase II dependent activated transcription. Although the two regulatory complexes are recruited to promoters by activation domain-interactions, the contribution of the different subunits or the different domains of the individual subunits is not completely understood. Taf9 is a shared subunit in TFIID and SAGA and has an N-terminal H3-like histone fold domain and a highly conserved C-terminal domain, Taf9-CTD. In this study, we have uncovered an essential role for the Taf9-CTD in transcriptional activation. The Taf9-CTD was not essential for the histone-fold mediated interaction with Taf6, SAGA and TFIID integrity or Gcn4 interaction with SAGA. Transcriptome profiling performed under Gcn4 activating conditions showed that the Taf9-CTD is required for expression of ~17% of the yeast genome and provides a coactivator function to recruit TFIID and SAGA complexes to the promoters in vivo during transcriptional activation. Integrated genome-wide data analysis showed that the Taf9-CTD is required for activation of promoters bound by several transcription factors indicating a broad role for Taf9-CTD in promoter occupancy of TFIID or SAGA complexes. Interestingly, only a subset of the promoters seemed to be dependent on the Taf9-CTD for assembly of the pre-initiation complex indicating redundancy in activator targets to assemble PIC in vivo. Together these results indicate that evolutionarily conserved domains in shared subunits of TFIID and SAGA have a pervasive role in genome-wide transcription. This GEO series consists of 14 microarray hybridizations using the Agilent two-color experiment with the Agilent Custom Saccharomyces cerevisiae 8x15k gene expression array. Four biological replicates each for the wild-type (TAF9), the mutant taf9-tCRD2 strain treated or untreated with SM, and the wild-type (TAF9) versus mutant taf9-tCRD2 treated with SM hybridized as dye-swapped replicates. Two biological replicates for wild-type (SPT20) vs spt20D strains treated with SM, and hybridized as dye-swapped replicates to identify the fraction of SAGA dependent genes under amino-acid starvation conditions. The overall aim was to identify genes dependent on the conserved C-terminal region domain of TAF9 and determine their dependence on the SAGA subunit Spt20 for expression.