Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., MC 0407, La Jolla, CA 92093-0407, USA.
Curr Opin Genet Dev. 2009 Dec;19(6):541-9. doi: 10.1016/j.gde.2009.09.006. Epub 2009 Oct 23.
Transcriptional regulation of human genes depends not only on promoters and nearby cis-regulatory elements, but also on distal regulatory elements such as enhancers, insulators, locus control regions, and silencing elements, which are often located far away from the genes they control. Our knowledge of human distal regulatory elements is very limited, but the last several years have seen rapid progress in the development of strategies to identify these long-range regulatory sequences throughout the human genome. Here, we review these advances, focusing on two important classes of distal regulatory sequences-enhancers and insulators.
人类基因的转录调控不仅依赖于启动子和附近的顺式调控元件,还依赖于远距离的调控元件,如增强子、绝缘子、基因座控制区和沉默元件,这些元件通常位于它们所调控的基因的远处。我们对人类远距离调控元件的了解非常有限,但在过去几年中,人们开发出了识别整个人类基因组中这些长距离调控序列的策略,并取得了快速进展。在这里,我们回顾这些进展,重点关注两类重要的远距离调控序列——增强子和绝缘子。