Regulator gene

In the regulation of gene expression, studied in evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), both activators and repressors play important roles.

Positive regulators are regulatory elements that permit RNA polymerase binding to the promoter region, thus allowing transcription to occur.

Examples such as cFLIP suppress cell death mechanisms leading to pathological disorders like cancer, and thus play a crucial role in drug resistance.

[10] Negative regulators of cell death in cancer include cFLIP, Bcl2 family, Survivin, HSP, IAP, NF-κB, Akt, mTOR, and FADD.

ChIP-chip is an in vivo technique used to determine genomic binding sites for transcription factors in two component system response regulators.

In vitro microarray based assay (DAP-chip) can be used to determine gene targets and functions of two component signal transduction systems.

This assay takes advantage of the fact that response regulators can be phosphorylated and thus activated in vitro using small molecule donors like acetyl phosphate.

Using the information provided by multiple sequence alignments and statistical rates, one can identify the best conserved motifs in the orthologous regions of interest.