putative promotor - (Feb/21/2010 )

Hallo all,

I was wondering what a putive promotor is.

Is this just a promotor of a putative gene?

Or?

And what is the word to describe a non constitutive promotor? (a promotor thats active in specific circumstanves)
Or is there no such word?

thanks

lyok on Feb 21 2010, 11:32 AM said:

It's a region of DNA sequence upstream of an open reading frame that is believed to be the promoter, but has not yet been shown to be the promoter.

For your second question, that may be referred to as an inducible promoter, and it likely has other regulatory regions (regulatory protein binding sites for example) encoded upstream.

fishdoc on Feb 21 2010, 07:36 PM said:

I see thanks a lot.

Can a constituvive promotor have such regulator regions? I think yes, but reading your reply I have my doubts.

lyok on Feb 21 2010, 01:19 PM said:

I think it's possible, only because I want to hedge my bet. There's too much that can affect gene expression to say that any gene doesn't have any type of regulation and that expression is ALWAYS on. Constitutive expression, in my opinion, is just a way of saying "the gene is on in every instance we've tested." There certainly could be some condition that could result in a shut down of the expression... but this is getting into a more hypothetical/philosophical discussion of gene regulation.