Evolutionary turnover of key amino acids explains conservation of function without conservation of sequence in transcriptional activation domains Author summary When and where genes are turned on determine what an organism looks like and how it responds to its environment. The turning on and off of genes is controlled by proteins known as trans...

I am thrilled to announce publication of our new paper! We show transcription factor evolution in fungi is driven evolutionary turnover at two length scales. 1) Turnover of entire activation domains and 2) turnover of key residues within an activation domain. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Short activation domains control chromatin association of transcription factors Single-molecule tracking of transcription factors in living cells revealed how mutations that make short activation domains stronger increased the fraction of transcription factor molecules bound to c...

I'm super excited that our paper was published last month! We find that very short activation domains can control the fraction of transcription factor molecules bound to chromatin. Vinson added some very nice extra experiments in the revised version! elifesciences.org/articles/105...

Short activation domains control chromatin association of transcription factors Transcription factors regulate gene expression with DNA-binding domains (DBDs) and activation domains. It is generally assumed that DBDs are solely responsible for interacting with DNA and chromatin. ...

Happy new year! Our new preprint is live! We use single molecule imaging in live cells to show that activation domains can control how transcription factors bind to chromatin. SMT 1 TF Dogma 0 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our new preprint went live on biorxiv. We show: 1) conservation of function without conservation of sequence for a transcription factor over 600 million years of evolution. 2) The key​ phenylalanine residues turnover​, moving around. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...