A study headed by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and published in the journal CHEM furthers the understanding of the asymmetry between nucleic acid hybrids. This advance may make a significant contribution ...
Biochemistry
Jun 13, 2019
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4
IMP scientists from the lab of Alexander Stark show why certain activators—enhancers or cofactor proteins—activate specific promoters. The findings, which are now reported in the journal Nature, could have implications ...
Biotechnology
May 16, 2019
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82
How, where and when genes are expressed determine individual phenotypes. If gene expression is controlled by many regulatory elements, what, ultimately, controls them? And how does genetic variation affect them? The SysGenetiX ...
Molecular & Computational Biology
May 02, 2019
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91
A Belgian team of computational biologists led by Stein Aerts (VIB-KU Leuven) has developed a new bioinformatics method called cisTopic. Inspired by text-mining methods, cisTopic helps scientists to gain insight into the ...
Molecular & Computational Biology
Apr 09, 2019
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5
Lil BUB has drawn millions of followers across the internet for her cute appearance. Behind the celebrity cat's unique features is a combination of two rare genetic variants, three molecular biologists from Germany and the ...
Biotechnology
Mar 06, 2019
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100
An international research team led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology has found that malaria parasite genomes are shaped by parasite-specific gene families, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Feb 04, 2019
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173
Researchers at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (MRC WIMM) have developed technology that allows scientists to explore the complex 3-D structure of DNA in Virtual Reality. In a newly published pre-print, ...
Molecular & Computational Biology
Jan 15, 2019
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7
A team of engineers at the University of Delaware has developed a method to use CRISPR/Cas9 technology to set off a cascade of activities in cells, a phenomenon known as conditional gene regulation. Their method, described ...
Biochemistry
Dec 11, 2018
1
127
Transcription activator-like effector (TALE) proteins can be designed to bind to almost any selected DNA. Researchers now report that a TALE can displace another TALE protein from DNA in a highly polarized way – it can ...
Cell & Microbiology
Nov 26, 2018
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27
Scientists once thought that humans must have 2 million genes to account for all our complexity. But since sequencing the human genome, researchers have learned that humans only have about 19,000 to 25,000 genes—not many ...
Evolution
Nov 21, 2018
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121
Gene modulation redirects here. For information on therapeutic regulation of gene expression, see therapeutic gene modulation.
Regulation of gene expression (or gene regulation) includes the processes that cells and viruses use to turn the information in genes into gene products. Although a functional gene product may be an RNA or a protein, the majority of known mechanisms regulate protein coding genes. Any step of the gene's expression may be modulated, from DNA-RNA transcription to the post-translational modification of a protein.
Gene regulation is essential for viruses, prokaryotes and eukaryotes as it increases the versatility and adaptability of an organism by allowing the cell to express protein when needed. The first discovered example of a gene regulation system was the lac operon, discovered by Jacques Monod, in which protein involved in lactose metabolism are expressed by E.coli only in the presence of lactose and absence of glucose.
Furthermore, gene regulation drives the processes of cellular differentiation and morphogenesis, leading to the creation of different cell types in multicellular organisms where the different types of cells may possess different gene expression profiles though they all possess the same genome sequence.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
