ABSTRACT
The extraordinary rate of progress in the study of eukaryotic gene control processes can be gauged from the fact that by 1980, no transcriptional regulatory protein or its DNA-binding site in a regulated gene promoter had been defined. Over the next decade however, tremendous advances were made and a relatively clear picture of the action of individual factors which regulate gene expression became available. For example, in the case of gene induction by glucocorticoid or related hormones it was known that these agents act by activating specific receptor proteins (Chapter 5, Section 5.1), that such activated receptors bind to specific DNA sequences upstream of the target gene (Chapter 4, Section 4.3), displacing a nucleosome (Chapter 3, Section 3.5) and that a region in the receptor protein then interacts with a factor bound to the TATA box to activate transcription (Chapter 5, Section 5.2).
