Can enhancers work in trans?

Yes they do work in trans.



Simple experiment, silence an enhancer, see what happens - protein produced or not?

Could you update us with an answer?

 Enhancers can work in trans when the DNA with the target promoter is linked to the DNA with the enhancer by a protein bridge.

I have sent this to my teacher, and he has not responded with an explanation for me yet. I will update when he gets back to me.

Thanks for getting back to us.

Any updates on this question?

Post Merge: 11 years ago

how could I propose an experiment to test this?

Anybody ever come up with the correct answer?

This process is called transvection, if one chromosome contains an enhancer while the gene it regulates in on another chromosome if they come into close proximity the enhancer will regulate the expression of the gene. one way to test this is to make two transgenes, one that contain a wild type and another that contains a mutant enhancer. You would put these two transgenes into a strain that contains a reporter gene. If the wild type enhancer regulates the reporter gene on'\ a separate transgene than you have proven the concept of transvection.

This is what my teacher wrote back to the question about the experiment.

Sorry it took so long to get back, he takes his time to grade our work.

Thanks so much for responding back! Appreciate it!