Ectopic expression of a conditional GATA-2/estrogen receptor chimera arrests erythroid differentiation in a hormone-dependent manner.

The GATA factors are a family of transcriptional regulatory proteins in eukaryotes that share extensive homology in their DNA-binding domains. One enigmatic aspect of GATA factor expression is that several GATA proteins, which ostensibly share the same DNA-binding site specificity, are coexpressed in erythroid cells. To elucidate the roles of individual GATA factors in erythropoiesis, conditional alleles of GATA-1, GATA-2, and GATA-3 were prepared by fusing each of the factors to the hormone-binding domain of the human estrogen receptor (ER). These GATA/ER chimeric factors were shown to be hormone-inducible trans-activating proteins in transient transfection assays. When stably introduced into primary erythroblasts or conditionally transformed erythroid progenitors cells, exogenous GATA-2/ER promoted proliferation and inhibited terminal differentiation in an estrogen-dependent manner. These phenotypic effects are specifically attributable to the action of ectopically expressed GATA-2/ER because erythroblasts expressing exogenous GATA-2 are constitutively arrested in differentiation and because erythroid progenitors expressing either Gal/ER or GATA-3/ER do not display a hormone-responsive block in differentiation. Thus, the GATA-2 transcription factor appears to play a role in regulating the self-renewal capacity of early erythroid progenitor cells.