Berkeley Lab Researchers Produce First Step-by-Step Look at
Transcription Initiation
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have achieved a major
advance in understanding how genetic information is transcribed from DNA to RNA
by providing the first step-by-step look at the biomolecular machinery that
reads the human genome.
“We’ve provided a series of snapshots that shows how the
genome is read one gene at a time,” says biophysicist Eva Nogales who led this
research. “For the genetic code to be transcribed into messenger RNA, the DNA
double helix has to be opened and the strand of gene sequences has to be
properly positioned so that RNA polymerase, the enzyme that catalyzes transcription,
knows where the gene starts. The electron microscopy images we produced show
how this is done.”