Junk DNA: A Journey Through The Dark Matter Of The Genome - Plot & Excerpts
Switching It On, Turning It UpWith a mere $1,700,000 price tag, the Bugatti Veyron is the world’s most expensive production road car. It’s hard to be sure what the cheapest car is, although the Dacia Sandero probably has a good claim to this honour, at about 1 per cent of the cost of the Veyron. But both cars have a number of things in common, and one of these is that each needs to be switched on before you can go anywhere. If you don’t activate the engine systems, nothing will happen.Our protein-coding genes are the same. Unless they are activated and copied into messenger RNA, they do nothing. They are simply inert stretches of DNA, just as a Veyron is a stationary hunk of metal and accessories until you hit the ignition. Switching on a gene is dependent on a region of junk DNA called the promoter. There is a promoter at the beginning of every protein-coding gene.If we think in terms of a traditional car, the promoter is the slot for the ignition key. The key is represented by a complex of proteins that bind to a promoter.
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