Abstract
The molecular approach to biological problems is incurably reductionist. If the secrets of inheritance can be uncovered by examining the structure of DNA, then should not differentiation and development also be explicable by simple molecular rules? With this outlook, molecular biologists, equipped with powerful recombinant DNA techniques, are now applying themselves to the problems of gene expression. For it is the control of gene expression that is believed to be at the heart of differentiation and development. The belief is based upon the evidence that cell types differ because of qualitative and quantitative differences in the proteins which they contain, and that differences in protein composition are primarily due to differences in gene activity at the transcriptional level.
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© 1986 Plenum Press, New York
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Bird, A.P. (1986). Patterns of DNA Methylation and Expression of Genes. In: Clayton, R.M., Truman, D.E.S. (eds) Coordinated Regulation of Gene Expression. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2245-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2245-0_3
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