“…Thus, the precise role of DDX5 in stimulating vitamin D-regulated transcription remains to be determined. Owing to its ability to interact with several components of the transcriptional machinery (e.g., CBP and p300, both of which also associate with VDR; RNA polymerase II; HDAC1) as well as with the splicesome component U1 snRNA (Jacobs et al, 2007;Metivier et al, 2003;Rachez and Freedman, 2000;Rossow and Janknecht, 2003;Wilson et al, 2004;Yamaoka et al, 2007), it is tempting to speculate that DDX5 might serve as an adaptor molecule or bridging factor that not only facilitates the formation of transcriptional initiation complexes by recruiting specific components of the transcription machinery (including chromatin remodeling factors) but may also serve to coordinate transcription with the post-transcriptional process, hence improving the kinetics of production of mature mRNA (Auboeuf et al, 2002(Auboeuf et al, , 2005Clark et al, 2008b;Fuller-Pace, 2006;Fuller-Pace and Ali, 2008), a concept consistent with current models of gene expression (Ares and Proudfoot, 2005;Proudfoot et al, 2002). In analogy with the suggestion of MacDonald et al (2004)), who proposed a pivotal role for SKIP/NCoA-62 as a transcription/splicing coupling factor based on their observations (i) that endogenous SKIP is recruited to native VDR-responsive promoters in a calcitriol-dependent manner in osteoblast cells where it cooperatively associates with the transcriptional machinery and (ii) that SKIP is furthermore present in nuclear spliceosome complexes, we propose that DDX5 may be a novel VDR interactor in human keratinocytes, having dual roles in transcriptional co-activation and transcript processing to yield mature calcitriol-responsive target-gene mRNAs.…”