Han, Byungjoo

About operon Operon is a group of adjacent genes transcribed as a single mRNA, and transcription of the operon is controlled by operator which is adjacent to the transcription initiation site (Cooper & Hausman, 2009). The term operon was made by Jacob and Monod who characterized the first defined classical operon, the lac operon, in E.coli. The birth and death of operons are a dynamic process. The complete genome sequences of 1,000 and more prokaryotes have now been determined by them. Many of sequence information have enabled genome-wide studies of bacterial genomes to be carried out, and the evolutionary life-cycle of operons to be inferred by comparison of related bacterial species (Osbourn & Field, 2009). They are widespread in all bacterial, archaeal, and in the typical genome. About half of all protein-coding genes are in multigene operons. Operons almost always code for genes in the same functional pathway. Operons are often conserved across species by vertical inheritance and tend to be quite compact: in most bacteria, genes in the same operon are usually separated by fewer than 20 base pairs of DNA. Both conservation and close spacing allow for the computational prediction of operons in diverse prokaryotes. (Price & Arkin & Alm, 2006) The lac operon is an example of a relatively simple genetic network. E.coli is one of the well-studied and best-understood structures. It consists of a promoter and operator region and three larger structural genes, lacZ, lacY and lacA, with a preceding regulatory operon responsible for producing a repressor protein. In the absence of glucose available for cellular metabolism, but in the presence of external lactose, lactose is transported into the cell by a permease. Lactose is then broken down into allolactose, first and then glucose and galactose by the enzyme B-galactosidase. The allolactose feeds back to bind with the lactose repressor and proceed the transcription process (Angelova & Ben-Halim,2011).

Han, Byungjoo

Ref. 1. Anne E. Osbourn & Ben Field (2009), Operons, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, 66, 37553775 2. Morgan N. Price & Adam P. Arkin & Eric J. Alm (2006), The Life-Cycle of Operons, PLoS Genetics, 2(6), 859-873 3. Maia Angelova & Asma Ben-Halim (2011), Dynamic model of gene regulation for the lac operon, Journal of physics: conference series, 286(1), 1-5 4. Cooper, Geoffrey M & Hausman, Robert E (2009), The Cell: A Molecular Approach (5ed), Sunderland, MA: Sinauer