Abstract
The lecture will begin with a series of definitions and a brief history of the discovery of enhancersequences in the early 1980s. The importance of this new concept will be discussed in particular in relation to the notion of a gene's" promoter ", i.e. the emergence of the possibility of sequences controlling not the simple start of gene transcription (RNA manufacture), but its specific expression in a particular cell type. This lecture will also cover the means (past and recent) of detecting such DNA sequences, as well as some of the functional tests applied to verify their nature.
