I want to know, in simple words, what transcriptional misregulation means. Being a computer science student, I am having trouble understanding the literature describing transcriptional misegulation. Kindly provide an explanation in layman's term
DNA is information (equivalent to bits and bytes in a computer) to run a cell. Transcription is like the "call" to a function in the DNA code. The DNA is then "transcribed" into RNA with is sort of like shipping that pit of code off to a CPU where the function will execute.
So, there are many ways a gene can be "turned off" and not transcribed, or "turned on" and transcribed. If you body needs insulin, a signal is sent into your insulin-producing cells to say "turn on the insulin gene" and the gene gets turned on and the transcript is made, then the introns are spliced out, and the messenger RNA is sent to the ribosomes to be translated into the insulin protein.
Transcriptional misregulation would be to turn on the gene when it should be off, so you get too much of that product (insulin in my example) or to turn off then gene when it should be on, so you don't have enough of the product.
The protein products of genes can also be regulated in many more ways, not only by turning the gene on or off. There are ways to speed up or slow down the production of the protein. There are ways to make the messages last a long time and produce many protein copies per message or to rapidly degrade the message so only one or a few protein copies are made. There are ways to turn the activity of the protein on or off after it is already made.
So transcriptional regulation is only one of a great many regulatory or control mechanisms at play in running a cell.
All you need to understand is the following key steps:
1. Every major function in the body (cells) is carried out by the molecules known as 'Proteins'.
2. Our DNA which is nothing but a very long sequence of nucleotides contains the information about these proteins in an encoded form (genes).
3. Gene->mRNA->protein is the basic route by which proteins are made. Here first reaction is known as 'Transcription' and second one is known as 'Translation'.
4. BUT whether a gene should be switched 'on' and carry this process is controlled by transcription factors (which are also proteins). The time for which a gene should be switched 'on' or 'off' is also controlled and executed by proteins.
5. Briefly there's an orchestra of various molecules here that regulate the protein synthesis and signaling. When this orchestra goes out-of-tune, we call it as transcriptional misregulation.
6. A perfect example would be the case of 'Cancer' where everything is haphazard. Genes switch on and off abruptly. Normal cells become zombie cells.
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