ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an up-to-date treatment of our general knowledge of transcriptional regulation in eukaryotes, with most of the detailed mechanistic understandings elucidated in animal and yeast model systems. It discusses some of the observations and recent advances in plant model systems that address transcriptional responses of plant genes to environmental and developmental cues. The chapter shows that interesting conserved mechanisms that may be used by highly divergent organisms to mediate transcriptional responses to stress. It summarizes the current state of knowledge on the control of transcription in eukaryotes. To generate the diverse expression patterns for the large number of genes present in the eukaryotic nucleus, a combinatorial scheme has evolved that provides a large repertoire of cis-acting sequences and trans-acting factors. The existence of most characterized transcription factors in families of related proteins containing identical, or very similar, DNA-binding domains suggests that multimerization between proteins can generate a diverse population of factors with distinct functional properties.
