microbiology, Vol 141, 2191-2200, Copyright © 1995 by Society for General Microbiology
The bacteriophage 434 operator/repressor system in yeast
CI Webster and WJ Brammar
ICI/University Joint Laboratory, Department of Biochemistry, University of Leicester, UK.
The ability of the bacteriophage 434 operator/repressor system to function
in a eukaryotic cell has been explored. An idealized 434 operator was
placed at various positions in the PGK promoter of Saccharomyces
cerevisiae: within the upstream activator sequence, close to the TATA box,
and downstream of the transcription-initiation site. Expression of the 434
cI gene from a 2 microns-based plasmid resulted in significant repression
of gene expression from constructs containing the altered promoters linked
to a beta-galactosidase reporter gene. Attempts to use a variant of the 434
repressor that has the binding specificity of the P22 repressor (434P22)
were unsuccessful, due to a severely inhibitory effect of this gene-product
on the growth of the yeast cells.
