Enhancer

Name:
Enhancer
Detailed information:
(1) A food additive that brings out the taste of a food product without contributing any taste of its own. Sodium glutamate is the most widely used substance of this class; its effective concentration is in parts per thousand.(2) a nucleotide sequence to which transcription factor(s) bind, and which increases the transcription of a gene. It is NOT part of a promoter; the basic difference being that an enhancer can be moved around anywhere in the general vicinity of the gene (within several thousand nucleotides on either side or even within an intron), and it will still function. It can even be clipped out and spliced back in backwards, and will still operate. A promoter, on the other hand, is position- and orientation-dependent. Some enhancers are “conditional” in that they enhance transcription only under certain conditions.See Potentiator.