Laboratorio Internacional de Investigación sobre el Genoma Humano, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Juriquilla, Mexico.
Aix-Marseille University, INSERM, TAGC, UMR 1090, Marseille, France; Equipe Labéllisée, Ligue Contre le Cancer, Paris, France.
Trends Biochem Sci. 2018 Jun;43(6):452-468. doi: 10.1016/j.tibs.2018.03.004. Epub 2018 Apr 16.
Gene expression in higher eukaryotes is precisely regulated in time and space through the interplay between promoters and gene-distal regulatory regions, known as enhancers. The original definition of enhancers implies the ability to activate gene expression remotely, while promoters entail the capability to locally induce gene expression. Despite the conventional distinction between them, promoters and enhancers share many genomic and epigenomic features. One intriguing finding in the gene regulation field comes from the observation that many core promoter regions display enhancer activity. Recent high-throughput reporter assays along with clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9-related approaches have indicated that this phenomenon is common and might have a strong impact on our global understanding of genome organisation and gene expression regulation.
高等真核生物中的基因表达是通过启动子和基因远端调控区域（称为增强子）之间的相互作用在时间和空间上精确调节的。增强子的最初定义暗示了远程激活基因表达的能力，而启动子则需要局部诱导基因表达的能力。尽管存在传统的区分，但启动子和增强子具有许多基因组和表观基因组特征。基因调控领域的一个有趣发现来自于观察到许多核心启动子区域具有增强子活性。最近的高通量报告基因检测以及成簇规律间隔短回文重复序列（CRISPR）/Cas9 相关方法表明，这种现象很常见，可能会对我们对基因组组织和基因表达调控的整体理解产生重大影响。
