Cockayne's syndrome cells lack transcription-coupled nucleotide excision repair (TCR) and ubiquitylation of RNA polymerase II large subunit (RNA pol II LS), suggesting that ubiquitylation of RNA pol II LS may be necessary for TCR in eukaryotes. Rsp5 is the sole yeast ubiquitin-protein ligase that ubiquitylates RNA pol II LS in cells exposed to DNA-damaging agents. In yeast lacking functional Rsp5, there is no ubiquitylation of RNA pol II LS. We show here that removal, repression, or over-expression of Rsp5 has no effect on TCR, demonstrating that ubiquitylation of the RNA pol II LS is not required for TCR. We infer that the lack of ubiquitylation of RNA pol II LS in Cockayne's syndrome cells does not cause their defect in TCR. C ockayne's syndrome (CS) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder displaying a variety of symptoms, including severe neurological abnormalities, dwarfism, deficiency of subcutaneous fat, and sun sensitivity (1). The UV sensitivity of CS patients and their cells in culture is thought to result from a deficiency in RNA synthesis (2), likely because of an inability to preferentially remove transcription-blocking DNA damage from the transcribed strands of expressed genes: i.e., impaired transcriptioncoupled repair (TCR) (3, 4).It has been shown that HeLa cells and normal human fibroblasts in culture ubiquitylate the large subunit of RNA polymerase II (RNA pol II LS) after exposure to UV radiation, cisplatin, mitomycin C, and methyl methanesulfonate (5). The ubiquitylation of RNA pol II LS was absent in UV-irradiated fibroblasts from CS patients. Interestingly, fibroblasts from patients displaying another autosomal recessive disorder associated with a DNA repair deficiency, xeroderma pigmentosum, were capable of ubiquitylating RNA pol II LS after UV irradiation (6). In both normal and xeroderma pigmentosum fibroblasts, the ubiquitylated form of RNA pol II LS was hyperphosphorylated, a form that is associated with the elongating transcription complex.Ubiquitin is a 76-amino acid peptide that gets linked via its terminal glycine (residue 76) to a cysteine residue of the ubiquitin-activating protein (E1) via a thioester bond. The ubiquityl moiety is then moved via transesterification from the E1 enzyme to a cysteine residue of one of the ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes (E2). Ubiquitin is then transferred via further transesterification to one or more -lysine residues in the acceptor or target protein. This step may require a ubiquitin-protein ligase, or E3. Finally, the recently identified E4 proteins bind ubiquitylated proteins and, together with E1, E2, and E3, facilitate formation of multiubiquitin chains on substrate proteins (7,8). Substrates of the ubiquitin system are degraded by the large 26S proteasome in an ATP-dependent fashion. Ubiquitylation may also serve a regulatory function independent of proteolysis. Ubiquitylation, through proteolysis and other mechanisms, plays a regulatory role in the cell cycle, cellular differentiation, stress responses, and many other cellular processes.In the...