ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a barebones discussion of the key features of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and matching ribonucleic acid (RNA) and afterwards devotes more attention to issues of the control and regulation of gene expression. It keeps many aspects of bioinformatics to a minimum, and methodological issues of sequence analysis, gene annotation, evolution, and phylogeny, as well as experimental methods of genome analysis and manipulation. The role of noncoding DNA is so far insufficiently understood, but some of this DNA is suspected to serve regulatory roles. The splicing process, which is controlled by a variety of signaling molecules, permits the translation from different combinations of RNA pieces and thereby increases the possible number of resulting proteins (alternative splice variants) considerably. A major breakthrough in our understanding of the regulation of gene expression was the discovery of operons in bacteria in the 1950s. Gene regulation may be approached with distinct computational modeling techniques.
