Talk:Promoter (genetics)

Some of the stuff in this article makes no sense at all to somebody without an in-depth understanding of the subject area. E.g. what does all that stuff in the bulleted list mean? JulesH 07:54, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Wait, if the promoter is +1, and upstream is negative, then how is -100 mean a position 100 bp's upstream from the promoter? To illustrate this point, note how -5 denotes a position 7 bp's upsteam of the promoter: +1 0 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5. I don't have my textbook with me, and I don't have time to search Entrez, but can someone with a good source actually confirm... - What is the position of the first bp of the promoter site? - What the heck does this mean? "Recent evidence also indicates that several genes (including the proto-oncogene c-myc) have G-quadruplex motifs as potential regulatory signals." I get what a proto-oncogene is, but for god's sake, how does this relate to the sentance before it? - Either link to sigma factors or give a brief explanation here. - For the conservation of sequence section, please give 5' and 3' indicators, and please reference a source. - Finally, I think I might have heard the term "Canonical sequence" maybe once during all of college. Is it like an EST but derived from genomic DNA and not cDNA? I looked at the stub, but it doesn't seem to totally correspond with the information used in this section.

This article seems to be focussing on really obscure aspects of the promoter before its really got a good description of what it does.