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Words
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Description
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| Enzyme
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A class of proteins that are capable of catalyzing chemical reactions (the making or breaking of chemical bonds). They do so by orienting their substrates into a suitable geometry in a particular location (the active site) where electrophilic or nucleophilic amino acid residues can participate in the reaction. Enzymes are protein catalyst that speeds up chemical reactions that would otherwise be prohibitively slow under physiological conditions. |
| Exon
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The region of DNA within a gene that codes for a polypeptide chain or domain. Typically a mature protein is composed of several domains coded by different exons within a single gene. |
| E-value
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For a given score, the number of hits in a database search that we expect to see by chance with this score or better. |
| Entrez
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An online retrieval system for searching several linked databases, provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). |
| Expression (gene or protein)
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A measure of the presence, amount, and time-course of one or more gene products in a particular cell or tissue. Expression studies are typically performed at the RNA (mRNA) or protein level in order to determine the number, type, and level of genes that may be up-regulated or down-regulated during a cellular process, in response to an external stimulus, or in sickness or disease. Gene chips and proteomics now allow the study of expression profiles of sets of genes or even entire genomes. |
| EST (Expressed sequence tag)
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cDNA sequence of a few hundred bases used to identify the corresponding gene. |
