Measurement
Measuring gene expression is an important part of many life sciences - the ability to quantify the level at which a particular gene is expressed within a cell, tissue or organism can give a huge amount of information. For example measuring gene expression can:
- Identify viral infection of a cell (viral protein expression)
- Determine an individual's susceptibility to cancer (oncogene expression)
- Find if a bacterium is resistant to penicillin (beta-lactamase expression).
Similarly the analysis of the location of expression protein is a powerful tool and this can be done on an organism or cellular scale. Investigation of localisation is particularly important for study of development in multicellular organisms and as an indicator of protein function in single cells. Ideally measurement of expression is done by detecting the final gene product (for many genes this is the protein) however it is often easier to detect one of the precursors, typically mRNA, and infer gene expression level.
Read more about this topic: Gene Expression
Famous quotes containing the word measurement:
“That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)