Do Bacteria Have the Transcription Factors? The Formation and Development of the Concept of “Transcription Factor” / 中国生物化学与分子生物学报

ABSTRACT

Over the past 20 years, there have been substantial divergences in academia around the world on the issue of whether bacteria have transcription factors (TFs). The traditional view is that bacteria do not have TFs, and their transcriptional activators and/or repressors regulate the transcription initiation, and TFs only bind to eukaryotic promoters. The typical representative of the traditional view is the mainstream international textbooks of Biochemistry and Molecular biology edited by some academic authorities. However, the new idea is that DNA binding transcriptional activators and repressors in bacteria are TFs, and the content and importance of which are no less than those of eukaryotes. Although the new idea has long been common in academic papers published in international academic journals, many scholars still have doubts. The concept of " transcription factor", like many terms of molecular biology, is constantly updated with the development of sciences, from narrowly-defined sense to broadly-defined sense. In the beginning, people thought that TFs were only necessary for the transcription initiation of eukaryotic genes, and bacteria did not need TFs. It was understandable that bacteria were excluded from the TFs’ scope of application at that time. The rich scientific research achievements in the past 40 years have proved that a large number of transcriptional activators and repressors bind to cis-regulatory elements other than promoters, including enhancers, silencers, and insulators in eukaryotes, as well as a variety of positive and negative regulatory elements in bacteria. These transcriptional regulatory proteins conform to all the basic characteristics of TFs, which make them worthy of the name " transcription factors". Therefore, the new idea is scientific, reasonable, and should be widely accepted and adopted by the academic community. In the future, whether the concept of " transcription factor " will be further expanded to chromatin-modifying proteins such as histone acetyltransferase (HAT) and ncRNAs, and even to " elongation factors" and " termination factors" of transcription, we should be open to this issue.