ABSTRACT
The transcription of a gene is finely regulated in time and in space: a given mRNA will be synthesized only in certain cell types, under different biotic or abiotic stresses, and at a certain stage of development of the individual. The information needed for this regulation is carried by regulation proteins and by nucleotide sequences located upstream and downstream of the coding sequence (see Profile 1). It is the interaction between the regulation proteins and these DNA sequences that decides the transcription of a gene. The functional analysis of promoters allows the dissection of regions of DNA intervening in a spatio-temporal regulation of the expression of a gene.
