Mode of interaction of the zinc finger protein TFIIIA with a 5S RNA gene of Xenopus.

The zinc finger protein TFIIIA, a positive transcription factor of the 5S RNA gene, binds to an internal control region of 50 nucleotides. Two modes of binding have been considered for the TFIIIA-DNA complex, one of which has been proposed on the basis of nuclease and chemical protection experiments and the other on model building. Since then, evidence has accumulated on the structures of individual components of the complex--for example, zinc finger polypeptides studied by NMR and a segment of the binding site analyzed by x-ray crystallography, but no high-resolution structural data on the TFIIIA-DNA complex itself are available. Probes used previously to study the TFIIIA-DNA complex do not react with every nucleotide of DNA, unlike hydroxyl radical, which cleaves DNA at every backbone position. We describe here the quantitative analysis of high-resolution hydroxyl radical footprints and suggest how the array of zinc fingers might interact with the double helix.