Solving the Hox Specificity Paradox
Thursday, January 22, 2015 - 09:10
in Biology & Nature
The remarkable diversity of anatomical features along the body axis of animals—the differences between the head, the thorax and the abdomen, for example—is determined by proteins in the Hox family. But almost as soon as the Hox genes were discovered, scientists began puzzling over how different Hox proteins could activate specific genes, because all of these proteins can bind to the same DNA sequences. Now Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientist David Stern says he and his colleagues have solved the paradox.