Life starts with one cell. When an organism develops, dividing cells specialize to form the variety of tissues and organs that build up the adult body, while keeping the same genetic material—contained in our DNA. In a process known as transcription, parts of the DNA—the genes—are copied into a messenger molecule—the ribonucleic acid (RNA)—that carries the information needed to produce proteins, the building blocks of life. The parts of our DNA that are read and transcribed determine the fate of our cells. The readers of the DNA are proteins called transcription factors: they bind to specific sites on the DNA and activate the transcription process. How they recognize which location on the DNA they need to bind to and how these are distinguished from other random binding sites in the genome remains an open question. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS), both located in Dresden, show that thousands of individual transcription factors team up and interact with each other. They collectively wet the DNA surface by forming liquid droplets that can identify clusters of binding sites on the DNA surface.
Click here for original story, How transcription factors find and recognize clusters of specific DNA sequences
Source: Phys.org