Old dogs and new tricks: meeting on mechanisms of eukaryotic transcription.

Abstract

The meeting was held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, August 29–September 2, 2001. It was organized by Nouria Hernandez, Robert Kingston and Richard Treisman. (Photo courtesy of Margot Bennett, 1995.) ![][1] The recent Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting ‘Mechanisms of Eukaryotic Transcription’ was a potent reminder of the astounding depth and complexity of the biological world. Despite years of intensive study and the extraordinary advances that have been made, transcriptional regulation remains a vibrant area of research that retains its ability to inspire and to surprise. Indeed, for the 470 participants who crammed into the Laboratory's Grace auditorium, this meeting served up a unique assortment of talks that not only answered many long‐standing questions in the transcription field, but also broke important new ground. In this report, we present just a small sample of the many exciting and provocative stories that were described at this meeting. These stories reveal that new discoveries are still being made in transcription and that some of our oldest and dearest friends still have a few surprises in store. ### Tails of RNA polymerase II RNA polymerase II (pol II) was understandably the focus of much attention at this meeting. Weighing in at well over 500 000 kDa, this highly conserved machine not only transcribes all protein‐encoding genes in eukaryotes, but also plays a major role in coordinating transcription with downstream events such as message capping, splicing and polyadenylation. The first talk of the meeting, given by P. Cramer (Munich, Germany), reported on an extraordinary tour de force of X‐ray crystallography, carried out in the laboratory of R. Kornberg (Stanford, CA). Cramer presented two X‐ray crystal structures of Saccharomyces cerevisiae pol II, a refined structure of the free enzyme at 2.8 A resolution (Cramer et al ., 2001), and a structure of a pol II elongation complex at 3.3 … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif