Depending on the outcome of social conflicts, ants of the species Harpegnathos saltator do something unusual: they can switch from a worker to a queen-like status known as gamergate. Now, researchers reporting in the journal ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 04, 2021
0
65
Roughly one in every 1,000 individuals worldwide suffers from a ciliopathy. Symptoms include visual impairment, loss of hearing, obesity, kidney diseases, intellectual disabilities, and many other—in some cases serious—disorders, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Nov 04, 2021
0
29
A CRISPR-Cas9 variant with deactivated DNA-cutting function—known as "dCas9"—is a powerful tool to help researchers understand what genes do when their expression is dialed up or down, but it has some limitations.
Molecular & Computational biology
Aug 04, 2021
0
13
St. Jude scientist Vibhor Mishra, Ph.D., is homing in on the location where important processes in gene regulation occur, and where single-stranded transcripts are converted into double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs).
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 28, 2021
0
8
The sensory cells in the inner ear and the touch receptors in the skin actually have a lot in common, according to a new study from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Neil Segil published in the Proceedings of the National Academy ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 12, 2021
1
13
All the cells of an organism share the same DNA sequence, but their functions, shapes or even lifespans vary greatly. This happens because each cell "reads" different chapters of the genome, thus producing alternative sets ...
Biotechnology
Jun 02, 2021
0
11
Medicago ruthenica, a wild and perennial legume forage widely distributed in semi-arid grasslands, is distinguished by its outstanding tolerance to environmental stress. It is a close relative of commonly cultivated forage ...
Plants & Animals
May 14, 2021
0
11
A study led by LMU plant biologist Hans-Henning Kunz uncovers a new role for ion transporters: they participate in gene regulation in chloroplasts.
Plants & Animals
May 13, 2021
0
7
A bacterial protein helps to stop transcription—the process of making RNA copies of DNA to carry out the functions of the cell—by causing the cellular machinery that transcribes the DNA to pause at the appropriate spots ...
Biotechnology
May 07, 2021
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82
Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland have discovered previously unknown non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) involved in regulating the gene expression of vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGF), the master regulators ...
Biotechnology
May 06, 2021
0
1
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
