Biologists capture fleeting interactions between regulatory proteins and their genome-wide targets

Biologists captured highly transient interactions between transcription factors — proteins that control gene expression — and target genes in the genome and showed that these typically missed interactions have important practical implications. The researchers developed a method to capture transient interactions of NLP7, a master transcription factor involved in nitrogen use in plants, revealing that the majority of a plant’s response to nitrogen is controlled by these short-lived regulatory interactions.