**1. Introduction**

Protein synthesis in eukaryotic organisms includes several steps and requires many regulatory events [1, 2]. One of these critical steps is ribosome biogenesis, which includes ribosomal protein gene (RPG) transcription and rRNA synthesis. As in many other central events in the cell, ribosome biosynthesis must be a regulated and coordinated process. A typical coordinated regulation of gene and protein expression is the presence of common DNA elements in the promoters of related genes, which are co-regulated by a discrete number of transcription factors. Those genes under the control of a common DNA element form a transcriptional

module (regulon). In this chapter, the authors will describe the state of the art of several topics associated to the transcription initiation from TATA-less promoters in eukaryotic organisms, such as the transcriptional regulation of RPGs in metazoan cells and the description of a novel mechanism of regulation present in the RPG of the fission yeast *Schizosaccharomyces pombe*.
