The dynamic response to an activator is dictated by nucleosome and TBP stability differences between TFIID house-keeping and SAGA regulated promoters. Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain:BY4742

Eukaryotic promoters can be divided in distinct classes. In yeast the well-established classes are promoters with a TATA box that preferentially use SAGA as cofactor and promoters containing a TATA-like element that are enriched for TFIID usage. Differences in SAGA and TFIID usage have been implicated in regulatability of gene expression. However, this aspect remains poorly characterized. Here, a conditional depletion strategy is used, combined with gene expression and transcription factor (TF) binding data, to investigate the differential response of these promoter types to perturbations of a single TF. Measuring promoter output over a range of nuclear TF concentrations showed that SAGA dominated genes are more responsive to TF perturbations than TFIID dominated genes. We show that the higher responsiveness of SAGA dominated genes is linked to both susceptibility of negative regulation by Mot1 and displacement of nucleosomes.