Nuclear RNA Species Activate DNA Transcription Within Chromatin. Presented at The 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, San Francisco, California, May 18, 1999. Total nuclear RNA has significant activator effect on repressed heterochromatin, but little additional effect on already-active euchromatin. Total cytoplasmic RNA and total yeast RNA have intermediate levels of activity.
Histones are uniformly inhibitory to already-active euchromatin.
Nuclear RNA species offer the potential for high gene specificity during activation.