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Updated: Aug 30, 2026

Analyzing and Building Nucleic Acid Structures with 3DNA
Published on: April 26, 2013
Structure of a designed dimeric zinc finger protein bound to DNA
Scot A Wolfe1, Robert A Grant, Carl O Pabo
1Department of Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. scot.wolfe@umassmed.edu
Abstract:
Proteins that employ dimerization domains to bind cooperatively to DNA have a number of potential advantages over monomers with regards to gene regulation. Using a combination of structure-based design and phage display, a dimeric Cys(2)His(2) zinc finger protein has been created that binds cooperatively to DNA via an attached leucine zipper dimerization domain. This chimera, derived from components of Zif268 and GCN4, displayed excellent DNA-binding specificity, and we now report the 1.5 A resolution cocrystal structure of the Zif268-GCN4 homodimer bound to DNA. This structure shows how phage display has annealed the DNA binding and dimerization domains into a single functional unit. Moreover, this chimera provides a potential platform for the creation heterodimeric zinc finger proteins that can regulate a desired target gene through cooperative DNA recognition.
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