The book builds from the basic relationship between promoters, operators and repressors that is at the heart of the decision between bacteriophage lambda's two lifestyles, lysis and lysogeny.
The account expands to include a brief discussion of other regulatory mechanisms that govern the expression of lambda's genome. It then goes on to extrapolate from these mechanisms to possible developmental decisions made in eukaryotic cells. Lambda, as we lambdologists always suspected, could be the genetic homunculus in all "higher" life forms.
Ptashne begins by presenting the current model of gene expression that he and his colleagues have unraveled so successfully. The reader needs no prior knowledge of the subject, for Ptashne gives all essentials along the way. He describes the structure of DNA in relation to the repressor and polymerase proteins that bind to it and discusses the subtleties of such bindings and interactions. He shows the repressor protein, known by ...
