MCB 2210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Transcriptome, Multicellular Organism, Epigenetics
31 Aug 2016
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Document Summary
While knowing the gene sequences of an organism can tell us exactly which proteins its cells are capable of producing, it can"t directly tell us how a cell works or what it will do. In any given cell, some genes are turned on , some are turned off . Some are expressed at high levels, some low. Transcription factors are the proteins that bind dna and can activate or repress the transcription of genes. Depending on which genes are being transcribed (the transcriptome) and translated, a cell will express a particular suite of proteins that helps define the potential of that cell. One of the central goals of cell biology is to understand how the interactions of different combinations of proteins and other cellular components are dynamically coordinated to give rise to the amazing diversity of cell types and behaviors. Not all of the information in a cell is encoded directly in dna in a form we can read.
