The zinc-finger protein Zelda is a key activator of the early zygotic genome in Drosophila

By Hsiao-Lan Liang, C. Nien, Hsiao-yun Liu, Mark M. Metzstein, N. Kirov, C. Rushlow. 2008

478 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In all animals, the initial events of embryogenesis are controlled by maternal gene products that are deposited into the developing oocyte. At some point after fertilization, control of embryogenesis is transferred to the zygotic genome in a process called the maternal-to-zygotic transition. During this time, many maternal RNAs are degraded and transcription of zygotic RNAs ensues. There is a long-standing question as to which factors regulate these events. The recent findings that microRNAs and Smaug mediate maternal transcript degradation have shed new light on this aspect of the problem. However, the transcription factor(s) that activate the zygotic genome remain elusive. The discovery that many of the early transcribed genes in Drosophila share a cis-regulatory heptamer motif, CAGGTAG and related sequences, collectively referred to as TAGteam sites raised the possibility that a dedicated transcription factor could interact with these sites to activate transcription. Here we report that the zinc-finger protein Zelda (Zld; Zinc-finger early Drosophila activator) binds specifically to these sites and is capable of activating transcription in transient transfection assays. Mutant embryos lacking zld are defective in cellular blastoderm formation, and fail to activate many genes essential for cellularization, sex determination and pattern formation. Global expression profiling confirmed that Zld has an important role in the activation of the early zygotic genome and suggests that Zld may also regulate maternal RNA degradation during the maternal-to-zygotic transition.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Iterative random forests to discover predictive and stable high-order interactions (2017, background): “Zld has been previously shown to play an essential role during the maternal–zygotic transition (33, 34), and there is evidence to suggest that Zld facilitates binding to regulatory elements (35).”
Temporal Coordination of Gene Networks by Zelda in the Early Drosophila Embryo (2011, background): “The recent discovery of the transcription factor Zld raised the possibility that a single factor could coordinately activate the early zygotic genome”
Transcriptional enhancers: from properties to genome-wide predictions (2014, background): “For example, motifs for the transcription factor Zelda (also known as Vielfaltig) were initially discovered as conserved and over-represented sequences in the regions upstream of pre-cellular blastoderm genes in Drosophila melanogaster 156,157 .”
The maternal-to-zygotic transition: a play in two acts (2009, background): “Interestingly, both ZLD (Liang et al., 2008) and SMG (Benoit et al., 2009) are required for the transcription of the miR-309 cluster, the products of which provide feedback to destabilize a subset of maternal mRNAs (Bushati et al., 2008).”
Zelda is differentially required for chromatin accessibility, transcription factor binding, and gene expression in the early Drosophila embryo (2015, methodology): “To independently verify these results, we repeated our gene expression analysis using publishedmicroarray data (Liang et al. 2008) and similarly demon-”
Establishment of regions of genomic activity during the Drosophila maternal to zygotic transition (2014, methodology): “Briefly, zld294, FRT19A/FM7 (Liang et al., 2008) virgin females were crossed with ovoD1,hsFLP112,FRT19A/Y (Liang et al.”
Zelda potentiates morphogen activity by increasing chromatin accessibility (2014, unknown): “In situ hybridization and antibody staining were performed as described previously [1, 44].”
Modification of enhancer chromatin: what, how and why? (2013, background): “Another intriguing example of a pioneer factor is provided by the Drosophila protein Zelda, which licenses early zygotic enhancers at the maternal to zygotic transition (MZT) (Harrison et al., 2011; Liang et al., 2008).”
Impacts of the ubiquitous factor Zelda on Bicoid-dependent DNA binding and transcription in Drosophila (2014, methodology): “To test this, we identified 36 genes associated with Bcd-dependent enhancers and plotted the wild-type:zld ratio of expression levels (calculated from Liang et al. 2008) with the same ratio of Bcd-binding strength (Fig.”