Name: Helen
Status: Student
Grade: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: United States
Date: March 2005
Question:
What are human homeodomains?
Replies:
The prefix homeo- means the same and domain means region or area.
Homeodomains are regions in regulatory proteins found in all species
that are made up of the same sequence of 60 amino acids. They are
referred to as regulatory proteins because they bind to DNA to either
inhibit or promote expression (transcription) of the target gene. This
60 amino acid domain is obviously extremely important since this
sequence has remained virtually unchanged over hundreds of millions of
years of evolution (from fruit flies to humans). For more information
go to Google and search homeodomains.
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