How do bacteria avoid wasteful production of unnecessary proteins when their genes are always on? The answer lies in regulating the operon. As trp levels increase, trp binds to trpR, causing a ...

Can the presence of glucose itself activate the genes that will break it down? It does in bacteria through a process known as positive transcription control.

New research suggests a possible explanation for the organization of operons, jointly controlled clusters of genes that evolved in bacterial chromosomes. Operons, which are found in the chromosomes of ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 87, No. 22 (Nov., 1990), pp. 8726-8730 (5 pages) We have cloned and characterized the mtr operon of Bacillus ...