The long term goal is to understand gene regulation during development in plants. The area on which the PI has chosen to focus his efforts is regulation of transcription, specially the initiation step. Assembly of the transcription complex is the first step at which regulation can occur. In order to evaluate events during the assembly process it was first necessary to isolate and purify several plant transcription factors (TFs), then to characterize them (wheat TFIIA and TFIID), and to establish a heterologous wheat/human in vitro transcription system using the cauliflower mosaic (CaMV) 35S promoter. Objectives for the next funding period are: 1. Continued biochemical characterization of wheat TFIIA 2. Continued biochemical characterization of wheat TFIID 3. Enzymology of transcription using wheat TFIIA AND wheat TFIID
