Members of the nuclear receptor superfamily directly activate or repress target genes by binding to hormone response elements (HREs) 1 in promoter or enhancer regions, and by binding to other DNA sequence-specific activators and can inhibit the transcriptional activities of other classes of transcription factors by transrepression. Hormone response elements provide specificity to receptor homodimer heterodimer binding (reviewed in Ref.2). Nuclear receptor functions are directed by specific activation domains, referred to as activation function 1 (AF-1), which resides in the N terminus, and activation function 2 (AF-2), which resides in the C-terminal ligand binding domain (LBD) (reviewed in Ref. 1). Regulation of gene transcription by nuclear receptors requires the recruitment of proteins characterized as coregulators, with liganddependent exchange of corepressors for coactivators serving as the basic mechanism for switching gene repression to activation. In this review, we discuss biochemical and genetic studies suggesting that coregulatory complexes are differentially utilized in both a cell-and promoter-specific fashion to activate or repress gene transcription. These coregulatory components, themselves targets of diverse intracellular signaling pathways, provide a combinatorial code for tissue-and gene-specific responses, utilizing both enzymatic and platform assembly functions to mediate the actions of nuclear receptor genetic programs critical for developmental and homeostatic processes in metazoan organisms.
Nuclear Receptor CoactivatorsA diverse group of proteins have emerged as potential coactivators for nuclear receptors. Ligand-dependent recruitment of coactivators is dependent on AF-2, which consists of a short conserved helical sequence within the C terminus of the LBD (2). Biochemical and expression cloning approaches have been used to identify a large number of factors that interact with nuclear receptors in either a ligand-independent or a ligand-dependent manner and are often components of large multiprotein complexes. Many of these factors are capable of potentiating nuclear receptor activity in transient cotransfection assays. In addition, a distinct set of coactivators is associated with the AF-1 domain. As the number of potential coregulators clearly exceeds the capacity for direct interaction by a single receptor, the most plausible hypothesis is that transcriptional activation by nuclear receptors involves the actions of multiple factors. These factors act in a sequential and/or combinatorial manner to reorganize chromatin templates and to modify and recruit basal factors and RNA polymerase II (3, 4).
ATP-dependent Chromatin Remodeling ComplexesAs chromatinized transcription units are "repressed" compared with naked DNA, a critical aspect of gene activation involves nucleosomal remodeling (reviewed in Refs. 3-5). Two general classes of chromatin remodeling factors that appear to play critical roles in transcriptional activation by nuclear receptors have been identified. These are ATP-depen...