Home > Terms > English, UK (UE) > Silencing
Silencing
The genetically programmed repression of transcription. Silencing may be the net effect of regulatory events that increase transcription and those which repress it (the analogue model), or it may be an all-or-none phenomenon in which the gene exists with its promoter and enhancer sites open and its coding region available to transcription or tightly folded and packaged into heterochromatin (the digital or binary switch model). In the latter view, the switch is operated by two similarly acting sequences: a locus control region (LCR) and a silencer. Both are cis-acting, function bi-directionally and their actions are position and distance dependent. The LCR promotes unfolding of the chromatin and allows a promoter to act; the silencer has the opposite effect. The switch is apparently set in each cell cycle during the S-phase.
- Part of Speech: noun
- Synonym(s):
- Blossary:
- Industry/Domain: Biology
- Category: Biochemistry; Molecular biology
- Company:
- Product:
- Acronym-Abbreviation:
Other Languages:
Member comments
Terms in the News
Featured Terms
Mario Cuomo
Mario Matthew Cuomo, (June 15, 1932 – 1 January 2015) was an American politician and Democratic Governor of New York from 1983 1994 t0o. An ...
Contributor
Featured blossaries
Browers Terms By Category
- Biochemistry(4818)
- Genetic engineering(2618)
- Biomedical(4)
- Green biotechnology(4)
- Blue biotechnology(1)
Biotechnology(7445) Terms
- General Finance(7677)
- Funds(1299)
- Commodity exchange(874)
- Private equity(515)
- Accountancy(421)
- Real estate investment(192)
Financial services(11765) Terms
- Dictionaries(81869)
- Encyclopedias(14625)
- Slang(5701)
- Idioms(2187)
- General language(831)
- Linguistics(739)
Language(108024) Terms
- Software engineering(1411)
- Productivity software(925)
- Unicode standard(481)
- Workstations(445)
- Computer hardware(191)
- Desktop PC(183)
Computer(4168) Terms
- Journalism(537)
- Newspaper(79)
- Investigative journalism(44)