The varicella-zoster virus major transactivator, IE62, can activate expression from homologous and heterologous promoters. High levels of IE62-mediated activation appear to involve synergy with cellular transcription factors. The work presented here focuses on functional interactions of IE62 with the ubiquitously expressed cellular factor USF. We have found that USF can synergize with IE62 to a similar extent on model minimal promoters and the complex native ORF28/29 regulatory element, neither of which contains a consensus IE62 binding site. Using Gal4 fusion constructs, we have found that the activation domain of USF1 is necessary and sufficient for synergistic activation with IE62. We have mapped the regions of USF and IE62 required for direct physical interaction. Deletion of the required region within IE62 does not ablate synergistic activation but does influence its efficiency depending on promoter architecture. Both proteins stabilize/increase binding of TATA binding protein/TFIID to promoter elements. These findings suggest a novel mechanism for the observed synergistic activation which requires neither site-specific IE62 binding to the promoter nor a direct physical interaction with USF.The varicella-zoster virus (VZV) major transcriptional activator, commonly designated the immediate-early 62 protein or IE62, is a potent and promiscuous transactivator of both homologous and heterologous promoters (reviewed in reference 38). The IE62 protein contains 1,310 amino acids (aa), and the major functional domains within the protein with respect to transactivation are an N-terminal acidic activation domain (AD) and a DNA binding domain. The IE62 activation domain (aa 1 to 86) is compositionally similar to other acidic activation domains found in herpes simplex virus VP16 and the pseudorabiesvirus major transactivator but shows little homology to those domains at the individual amino acid level (4, 34).The DNA binding domain of IE62 is contained within aa 468 to 640 of the IE62 sequence. Previous studies showed that bacterially expressed fragments of IE62 containing this region are capable of binding to a variety of VZV and non-VZV promoter elements (2,50,51,53). The ability of IE62 to interact directly with DNA has been shown to be an important aspect of its mechanism of activation since mutations in IE62 which ablate DNA binding also abrogate transactivation (49). However, it is unclear if IE62 is required to bind to a specific sequence. DNase protection studies by Wu and Wilcox (53) identified a consensus sequence (-ATCGT-) to which a recombinant fusion protein containing the IE62 DNA binding domain bound tightly. Other work, however, indicated that IE62 is capable of binding numerous sequences within promoters (2, 22, 50). Finally, an extensive analysis by Perera (32) showed that IE62 is capable of transactivation of minimal promoters containing only a TATA box and lacking all known or permuted IE62 binding sites.The mechanism(s) of IE62 activation is largely unknown. Perera (32) showed that IE62 was able to...