Gene that confers seed tolerance to salinity identified

Seeds only germinate when a series of internal and environmental needs are met. Otherwise, they get stuck in a state of dormancy. Researchers from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) led by Paula Duque just revealed ...

Studying epigenetic regulation at the single-molecule level

If one imagines the genome as an instruction manual for the functioning of a cell, every page of this manual is covered with annotations, highlights, and bookmarks. The role of some of these marks remains mysterious—do ...

The not so inactive X chromosome

Nearly every cell in our body contains pairs of each of our chromosomes, and these pairs are identical in all but one case: that of our sex chromosomes. Males typically have one X and one Y sex chromosome, while females typically ...

Researchers construct pan-3D genome of soybean

High-order chromatin structure is a prerequisite for the function of cis-regulatory elements in the genome, which plays an important role in gene regulation. In eukaryotes, the organization of the three-dimensional (3D) genome ...

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Regulation of gene expression

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.

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