The 5' half of the EWS gene has recently been described to be fused to the 3' regions of genes encoding the DNA-binding domain of several transcriptional regulators, including ATF1, and ERG, in Members of the Ets family form a novel class of sequencespecific DNA-binding proteins which are implicated in developmental processes, in the response of cells to extracellular signals, and in cellular transformation (for reviews, see references 23 and 70). They are characterized by an 85-amino-acid region of similarity, the Ets domain, which is essential for sequence-specific binding to DNA (20,28,30,37,50,64,69,73). DNA sequences bound by several Ets family members have been analyzed in detail and found to include about 10 nucleotides centered over a central GGAA core sequence (11,18,50,67,78). These sequences when multimerized upstream of a minimal promoter or when present in the context of natural viral and cellular promoters/enhancers mediate transcriptional regulation by Ets proteins (8,30,55,56,71,74,79). Consistent with these properties, specific transcriptional activation domains have been mapped in Ets-1, 39,59
