Berlin 2008 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 26: Posters II

BP 26.41: Poster

Donnerstag, 28. Februar 2008, 17:00–19:30, Poster A

A physical model for Bicoid controlled enhancers in Drosophila — •Wolfram Möbius^1,2 and Ulrich Gerland² — ¹Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics (ASC) and Center for NanoScience (CeNS), LMU München — ²Institute for Theoretical Physics, Universität zu Köln

Transcription activity of genes in eukaryotes is regulated by regions called cis-regulatory modules (CRM), in some cases located several thousands of base pairs up- or downstream of the gene of interest. While function of these CRMs, also called enhancers, has been qualitatively understood in terms of activating and repressing proteins binding to the DNA, a quantitative mapping from DNA sequence to transcription activity is still missing. In early Drosophila development, the protein Bicoid forms a concentration gradient along the embryo axis and controls various target genes which are expressed in different regions. We use this experimentally known mapping of Bicoid concentration to gene activation in vivo as well as Bicoid binding data to study correlations between Bicoid assembly at CRMs and transcription activity of the target genes.