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Reading the Human Genome

By Guest PostMarch 10, 2013Scienceautomated data collection, berkeley lab, biomolecular machinery, biophysicist eva nogales, cellular process, central dogma, cryo electron microscopy, cryo em, DNA, dna promoter complex, dylan taatjes, gene sequence, genetic information, human genome, jie fang, malfunctions, molecular biology, paula flicker, pre initiation complex, rna, rna polymerase, rna transcription, structural data, tata binding protein, tbp, transcription, transcription factors, yuan he

Berkeley Lab Researchers Produce First Step-by-Step Look at Transcription Initiation

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have achieved a major advance in understanding how genetic information is transcribed from DNA to RNA by providing the first step-by-step look at the biomolecular machinery that reads the human genome.

“We’ve provided a series of snapshots that shows how the genome is read one gene at a time,” says biophysicist Eva Nogales who led this research. “For the genetic code to be transcribed into messenger RNA, the DNA double helix has to be opened and the strand of gene sequences has to be properly positioned so that RNA polymerase, the enzyme that catalyzes transcription, knows where the gene starts. The electron microscopy images we produced show how this is done.” (more…)

New Key to Organism Complexity Identified

By Guest PostJanuary 26, 2013Scienceangstroms, animal kingdom, berkeley lab, caenorhabditis elegans, california, canonical, critical transcription factors, cryo electron microscopy, dna binding proteins, dna promoter, drosophila, eva nogales, fruit fly, gene expression, gene pool, genome, george kassavetis, humans, james kadonaga, jie fang, level of gene, lobe a, macromolecular complex, mice, michael cianfrocco, model, molecular mechanism, organism, patricia grob, protein coding genes, rearranged, rna, single substructural element, species, split personality, structural states, tamar juven gershon, tfiid, transcription factors, university

Berkeley Scientists Find that a Critical Transcription Factor Co-exists in Two Distinct States

The enormously diverse complexity seen amongst individual species within the animal kingdom evolved from a surprisingly small gene pool. For example, mice effectively serve as medical research models because humans and mice share 80-percent of the same protein-coding genes. The key to morphological and behavioral complexity, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests, is the regulation of gene expression by a family of DNA-binding proteins called “transcription factors.” Now, a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley has discovered the secret behind how one these critical transcription factors is able to perform – a split personality. (more…)

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Reading the Human Genome

New Key to Organism Complexity Identified