Latest Publications
N-terminal tagging of RNA Polymerase II shapes transcriptomes more than C-terminal alterations
Adam Callan-Sidat, Emmanuel Zewdu, Massimo Cavallaro, Juntai Liu, Daniel Hebenstreit
RNA polymerase II (Pol2) has a C-terminal domain (CTD) that is unstructured, consists of a large number of heptad repeats, and whose precise function remains unclear. Here, we investigate how altering the CTD’s length and fusing it with protein tags affects transcriptional output on genome-wide scale in mammalian cells, at single cell resolution. While transcription generally appears to occur in burst-like fashion, where RNA is predominantly made during short bursts of activity that are interspersed with periods of transcriptional silence, the CTD’s role in shaping these dynamics seems gene-dependent; global patterns of bursting appear mostly robust to CTD alterations