Gene expression in time and space: additive vs hierarchical organization of cis -regulatory regions
In higher eukaryotes, individual genes are often intermingled with other genes and spread out across tens to hundreds of kilobases, even though only small portions of their sequence are devoted to protein coding. Yet, in this seemingly extended and tangled mess, the cell is able to precisely regulat...
Saved in:
Published in | Current opinion in genetics & development Vol. 21; no. 2; pp. 187 - 193 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
England
Elsevier Ltd
01.04.2011
|
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | In higher eukaryotes, individual genes are often intermingled with other genes and spread out across tens to hundreds of kilobases, even though only small portions of their sequence are devoted to protein coding. Yet, in this seemingly extended and tangled mess, the cell is able to precisely regulate gene expression in both time and space. Over the past few decades, numerous elements, like enhancers, silencers and insulators have been found that shed some light on how the precise control of gene expression is achieved. Through these discoveries, an additive model of gene expression was envisioned, where the addition of the patterning details imparted by regulatory elements would create the final pattern of gene expression. Although many genes can be described using this model, recent work in the Drosophila bithorax complex suggests that this model may be somewhat simplistic and, in fact, regulatory elements sometimes seem to communicate with each other to form a functional hierarchy that is far from additive. |
---|---|
Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-3 content type line 23 ObjectType-Review-1 |
ISSN: | 0959-437X 1879-0380 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.gde.2011.01.021 |