第1章基因工程综述.ppt

* The concept of the gene has changed considerably (see?history section). From the original definition of a unit of inheritance, the term evolved to mean a?DNA-based unit that can exert its effects on the organism through?RNA?or?protein?products. It was also previously believed that one gene makes one protein; this concept was overthrown by the discovery of?alternative splicing?and?trans-splicing.[15] The definition of a gene is still changing. The first cases of RNA-based?inheritance?have been discovered in mammals.[28]?Evidence is also accumulating that the?control regions?of a gene do not necessarily have to be close to the?coding sequence?on the linear molecule or even on the same chromosome. Spilianakis and colleagues discovered that the?promoter region?of the?interferon-gamma?gene on chromosome 10 and the regulatory regions of the T(H)2?cytokine?locus on chromosome 11 come into close proximity in the?nucleus?possibly to be jointly regulated.[29]?Even the coding sequence of a gene itself doesnt have to be all on the same chromosome: Marande and Burger showed that, in the?mitochondria?of the?protistDiplonema papillatum, genes are systematically fragmented into small pieces that are encoded on separate chromosomes, transcribed individually, and then concatenated into contiguous messenger RNA molecules.[30] The concept that genes are clearly delimited is also being eroded. There is evidence for fused proteins stemming from two adjacent genes that can produce two separate protein products. While it is not clear whether these fusion proteins are functional, the phenomenon is more frequent than previously thought.[31]?Even more ground-breaking than the discovery of fused genes is the observation that some proteins can be composed of?exonsfrom far away regions and even different chromosomes.[3][32]?This new data has led to an updated, and probably tentative, definition of a gene as a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functio