As a post doctoral fellow in Paul Sigler's lab at Yale University, I was involved in structural studies of eukaryotic basal preinitiation components culminating in the crystal structure of the TBP/TFIIA/TATA complex from yeast.

The figure below represents this structure with hTFIIB modeled to represent the quaternary complex. TBP is green, TFIIB is red, the two subunits of TFIIA are yellow and blue, and the DNA is represented using a space filling model.

The DNA in the crystal has been extended on both ends using generic B-DNA to show the trajectory of the DNA on either side of the complex. hTFIIB was modeled using coordinates graciously provided by S. Burley and D. Nikolov.

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