Screening HIF-1 Cofactors in Breast Cancer Cells by RIME

Hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) is a transcription factor that acts as a master regulator of oxygen homeostasis in metazoan species by binding to hypoxia response elements (HREs) and activating the transcription of hundreds of genes in response to reduced O2 availability. RNA polymerase II (Pol II) initiates transcription of many HIF target genes under non-hypoxic conditions, but pauses after 20-100 nucleotides and requires HIF-1 binding for release. Here we report that in hypoxic breast cancer cells, HIF-1 recruits TRIM28 and DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK) to HREs to release paused Pol II. We show that HIF-1α and TRIM28 assemble the catalytically-active DNA-PK heterotrimer, which phosphorylates TRIM28 at serine-824, enabling recruitment of CDK9, which phosphorylates serine-2 of the Pol II large subunit C-terminal domain and the negative elongation factor to release paused Pol II, thereby stimulating productive transcriptional elongation. Our studies have revealed a critical molecular mechanism by which HIF-1 stimulates gene transcription and suggest that the anticancer effects of drugs targeting DNA-PK in breast cancer may be due in part to their inhibition of HIF-dependent transcription.