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 Article: Regulating Evolution
Discovery: Gene expression is altered, not the specific gene.
You have DNA, on which you have a gene, which is responsible for protein manufacturing. But what is transferred to the ribosome is not an exact copy of the gene, itʼs the gene expression. The gene expression starts when a transcription factor protein attach to enhancers which is part of the dna, these are responsible for saying whether or not part of the gene should be expressed, once the transcription factor attaches to the enhancer part of the dna, an enzyme called polymerase begins to write a copy of the gene in the form of RNA that can be then read by the ribosome. This allows for the gene to remain the same, and the enhancer to change allowing or disallowing a transcription factor protein to attach and thus turn on or off the gene expression. This is important because some genes are pleiotropic, which means they have multiple parts of their body using the same gene and enhancer. This means that they can simply turn off or on the introduction of a transcription factor (which is just a protein) in a given cell to enable or disable the production of the final protein used for structural synthesis.