Neuroscience

CRISPR-based strategy restores neurons affected by Rett syndrome

Rett syndrome is a rare, progressive neurodevelopmental disorder that typically affects girls, causing severe intellectual disability, loss of motor skills, and autism-like symptoms, and there is currently no cure. Rett syndrome ...

Genetics

3D map reveals DNA organization within human retina cells

National Eye Institute researchers mapped the organization of human retinal cell chromatin, the fibers that package 3 billion nucleotide-long DNA molecules into compact structures that fit into chromosomes within each cell's ...

Parkinson's & Movement disorders

Building momentum against Parkinson's

A team led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School has taken a step toward solving a central mystery of Parkinson's disease: What is the normal function of the protein whose misfolding causes ...

Immunology

How tiny changes help T cells to survive

The research group led by immunologists Vigo Heissmeyer and Taku Ito-Kureha of LMU and Helmholtz Munich has revealed the essential function of m6A modifications in T cells.

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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.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA