Lessons in transcriptional regulation learned from studies on immunoglobulin genes

In this article, we consider basic principles of eukaryotic gene transcriptional regulation which have emerged from studies on immunoglobulin heavy chain and kappa chain genes. Four areas are considered: (1) regulation by distant enhancer elements, (2) multiple regulators in a given element including particular families of regulators which were discovered by studying Ig genes, (3) achieving tissue specificity of transcription by multiple mechanisms and (4) the importance of chromatin structure for transcriptional regulation.