The panel was completed by testing jumonji (JARID2), the only member of its subfamily. jumonji is developmentally important in diverse organs (32,33), and can act as a transcriptional repressor in a reporter assay (34). Although jumonji has JmJN and JmJC domains in common with the JARID1 subfamily, the members of JARID1 are more similar to each other than to jumonji. Within the ARID domain, jumonji is only about 25% identical to members of the JARID1 group, which are 83% identical to each other. The jumonji ARID domain binds DNA in the pull-down assay without detectable sequence specificity (Figure 4). jumonji does show more of a tendency than other ARID family members to retain binding to lower molecular weight (<200 bp) DNA fragments even at high stringency, suggesting it does not disassociate as rapidly from DNA. This survey indicates that five of the seven ARID subfamilies bind DNA with no obvious sequence specificity. These results are summarized in Table 1.
