Regulation of Mammalian Gene Expression

Abstract

Regulation of mammalian gene expression has been an ever growing subject in the field of Biology and the biomedical science research. In the last several decades, extensive amount of research together with the implementation of the latest technologies revealed that the whole process is regulated at the multiple stages with a series of interconnected complex biochemical and molecular pathways. Unearthing this complexity in one hand helps us in understanding the concerted effort put by the respective cellular machinery to regulate the whole process, and on the other hand, it provides a new insight about the development of several diseases where gene expressions play a pivotal role. Discussions here focus on the involvement of transcription factors or cofactors and the linkage of the transcription network with the signal transduction pathways. Besides proteins as a regulator, the role of the nucleic acids such as miRNA, chromosomal conformation and the modification of DNA bases or core histone proteins, in gene expression has also been explored. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the big picture of the diverse regulatory network and the phenomenal complexity of the regulation of gene expression.