Molecular cloning of human CREB-2: an ATF/CREB transcription factor that can negatively regulate transcription from the cAMP response element.

The cAMP response element (CRE) is an octanucleotide motif (TGACGTCA) that mediates diverse transcriptional regulatory effects. In this report we describe the isolation and characterization of a full-length cDNA that encodes a CRE binding protein called CREB-2. Like other ATF/CREB transcription factors, the 351-amino acid CREB-2 protein contains a COOH-terminal leucine-zipper motif and an adjacent basic domain. CREB-2 mRNA is expressed ubiquitously in human tumor cell lines and mouse organs suggesting that it is involved in regulating transcription in a wide variety of cell types. Overexpression of CREB-2 resulted in a consistent and significant repression of CRE-dependent transcription in CV-1 cells. Deletional analyses localized the transcriptional repressor activity of CREB-2 to a 102-amino acid COOH-terminal region (amino acids 249-351) that contains the leucine-zipper and basic domains of the molecule. These results demonstrate that CRE-dependent transcription can be both positively and negatively regulated by structurally related members of the ATF/CREB family.