Genetics

Machine learning sheds light on gene transcription

A team led by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center has developed deep learning models to identify a simple set of rules that govern the activity of promoters—regions of DNA that initiate the process by which genes ...

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Herpes cure with gene editing makes progress in laboratory studies

Researchers at Fred Hutch Cancer Center have found in pre-clinical studies that an experimental gene therapy for genital and oral herpes removed 90% or more of the infection and suppressed how much virus can be released from ...

Genetics

Early genetic development of the brain mapped

In an article published in Nature, researchers from Karolinska Institutet present an atlas of the early development of the brain. The atlas can be used, among other things, to find out what went wrong in the development of ...

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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