A double-edged sword to force posterior dominance of Hox genes
✍ Scribed by Narendra Pratap Singh; Rakesh K. Mishra
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2008
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 195 KB
- Volume
- 30
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0265-9247
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Spatially and temporally restricted expression of Hox genes requires multiple mechanisms at both the transcriptional and the post-transcriptional levels. New insight into this precise expression mechanism comes from recent findings of a novel sense-antisense miRNA combination from the bithorax complex of Drosophila melanogaster. (1)(2)(3)(4) These two miRNAs encoded from the same locus target 3 0 untranslated regions of anterior hox genes, Antp, Ubx and abd-A to establish the dominance of posterior hox gene Abd-B in its expression domain. Such double-edge tools, sense-antisense miRNA combinations, also operate at multiple loci in the genome implicating their wider impact on the post-transcriptional gene regulation in eukaryotes.