Description
Book SynopsisThe cell can be viewed as a ''collection of protein machines'' and understanding these molecular machines requires sophisticated cooperation between cell biologists, geneticists, enzymologists, crystallographers, chemists and physicists. To observe these machines in action, researchers have developed entirely new methodologies for the detection and the nanomanipulation of single molecules. This book, written by expert scientists in the field, analyses how these diverse fields of research interact on a specific example - RNA polymerase. The book concentrates on RNA polymerases because they play a central role among all the other machines operating in the cell and are the target of a wide range of regulatory mechanisms. They have also been the subject of spectacular advances in their structural understanding in recent years, as testified by the attribution of the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2006 to Roger Kornberg. The book focuses on two aspects of the transcription cycle that have been
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Where it all Begins: An Overview of Promoter Recognition and Open Complex Formation; Chapter 2: Opening the DNA at the Promoter; The Energetic Challenge; Chapter 3: Intrinsic In Vivo Modulators: Negative Supercoiling and the Constituents of the Bacterial Nucleoid; Chapter 4: Transcription by RNA Polymerases: From Initiation to Elongation, Translocation and Strand Separation; Chapter 5: Single-molecule FRET Analysis of the Path from Transcription Initiation to Elongation; Chapter 6: Real-time Detection of DNA Unwinding by Escherichia coli RNAP: From Transcription Initiation to Termination; Part II: Transcription Elongation and Termination, Interlude, The Engine and the Brake; Chapter 7: Substrate Loading, Nucleotide Addition, and Translocation by RNA Polymerase; Chapter 8: Regulation of RNA Polymerase through its Active Center; Chapter 9: Kinetic Modeling of Transcription Elongation; Chapter 10: Mechanics of Transcription Termination; Conclusion: Past, Present, and Future of Single-molecule Studies of Transcription
