Deciphering genetic regulatory codes: A challenge for functional genomics

摘要

In the past two decades, considerable effort has been devoted to elucidating the mechanisms of transcriptional regula- tion in metazoans. A number of funda- mental principles have been established concerning the functions of many tran- scription factors (TFs) and the cis-acting sequences to which they bind (1). One hypothesis that has emerged from these studies is that genes with similar temporal and spatial expression patterns are subject to a common regulatory logic. That is, unique "transcriptional codes" govern the activation and repression of genes in par- ticular developmental contexts (2, 3).