Affinity labelling and cloning of steroid and thyroid hormone receptors / edited by H. Gronemeyer.

Date:
[1988]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Affinity labelling and cloning of steroid and thyroid hormone receptors / edited by H. Gronemeyer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/332 page 9
    Editor's introduction This book describes the exploration of a pathway — sometimes stony and tedious — that leads from the identification and characterization of some members of a family of transcriptional regulatory proteins to the initiation of their functional analysis. Along the way some old questions have been answered but, more importantly, it has become possible to ask new types of questions which were hidden beyond the scientific horizon a few years ago. The genealogical analysis of what is now recognized as a superfamily of nuclear receptor genes began with the applications of new techniques to a specific class of transcription factors that become active by binding steroidal ligands. This binding is reversible and represented a major problem for various preparative and analytical procedures. In consequence, initially, several molecular weights were assigned to each receptor and it was not clear whether proteolysis, aggregation or complex formation was responsible for the different forms. Therefore the development of affinity labeling techniques, providing a means of converting reversible into covalent ligand binding, was a most important contribu¬ tion to the study of steroid receptor proteins. Techniques nourish knowledge and therefore the first section of this book (Chapters 1 to 6) deals with a detailed experimental description of affinity labeling techniques and techniques used in conjunction with crosslinking. The results that have been obtained in applying these methods to study steroid and thyroid hormone receptors are described in the subsequent section (Chapters 7 to 13). The idea of treating both steroid and thyroid hormone receptors in such a volume was not easily accepted when this book was conceived because they were considered structurally (ligand) and functionally (localization, activation, translocation) very different according to classical views. It turned out, however, that both of these receptors are children of the same family and that some classical concepts have to be modified. In fact, now it would be considered a mistake to exclude the thyroid receptor from such a treatise. A specific type of analysis using crosslinking techniques, which is not considered in this book, is illustrated in Fig. 1. This shows that it is possible to localize steroid receptor binding sites on polytene chromosomes (for review and references see
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3