Learn What Controls Gene Expression During Retina Formation

Controller of gene expression during retina formation — ‘modular’ super-enhancer has been discovered by a study at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, published in Nature Communications. The study has identified distinct functions for regions of a super-enhancer. Enhancers are specific regions of DNA that do not code for proteins but control how genes are expressed.

Super-enhancers are clusters of enhancers that together regulate genes with important roles in cell identity. The team had studied the Vsx2 super-enhancer and its role in the development of the retina.

It was found that the super-enhancer has four distinct regions with different functions, thereby paving the way to study gene expression during development.

“In brain development, important transcription factors, like Vsx2, and many others, are often expressed in different parts of the developing brain at different times but in a precisely orchestrated way. We wanted to better understand how this complicated dance of expression is controlled where the gene is turned on at one moment in one cell type, then turned off in another and later activated in a different region completely.” “When you can fully understand how one of these modular super-enhancers works, you can go globally to all the super-enhancers with a framework to understand them more broadly,” says corresponding author Michael Dyer, PhD, St. Jude department of developmental neurobiology chair and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Source-Medindia