Developmental roles of 21 Drosophila transcription factors are determined by quantitative differences in binding to an overlapping set of thousands of genomic regions

Stewart MacArthur, Xiao-Yong Li, Jingyi Li, James B Brown, Hou Cheng Chu, Lucy Zeng, Brandi P Grondona, Aaron Hechmer, Lisa Simirenko, Soile VE Keränen, David W Knowles, Mark Stapleton, Peter Bickel, Mark D Biggin, Michael B Eisen

We previously established that six sequence-specific transcription factors that initiate anterior/posterior patterning in Drosophila bind to overlapping sets of thousands of genomic regions in blastoderm embryos. While regions bound at high levels include known and probable functional targets, more poorly bound regions are preferentially associated with housekeeping genes and/or genes not transcribed in the blastoderm, and are frequently found in protein coding sequences or in less conserved non-coding DNA, suggesting that many are likely non-functional.