Research into transcription factors deepen understanding of the ‘language’ of the genome, offering insights into human development.
New research has uncovered more about the complexity of human gene regulation by identifying certain sequences of proteins called transcription factors that bind to DNA and regulate the expression of human genes.
Published today (9 April) in Nature, researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge and their collaborators explored how DNA-guided transcription factors interact with each other.
This research adds to the groundwork of understanding the complex language of the gene regulatory code, and how DNA sequence patterns located close to our genes influence human development and disease risk.
Each gene has a regulatory region that contains instructions on when and where the gene is expressed. This information is written in a code that is read by transcription factors, which bind to specific DNA sequences and either increase or decrease the gene’s expression.
Previous research has explored the ‘language’ of the genome — the regulatory code that controls gene expression. It found that cooperation between multiple transcription factors is a key feature of transcription factor-DNA binding, with DNA actively facilitating interactions between various transcription factors.1 With the regulatory code being far more complex than the genetic code, which explains how DNA sequence determines the structure of proteins, researchers are aiming to understand the regulatory language in more detail, focusing on the ‘words’ and ‘grammar’ — such as the transcription factors — that influence when and where genes are expressed.
Credit: Sanger Institue Communications Team