Describe how E. coli uses the negative and positive control of the lac operon to economize on RNA and protein synthesis?

Answer 1

if a regulatory protein in its active state turns off the expression of the operon, the operon is said to be negatively regulated by the regulatory protein. if the regulatory protein in its active state truns on the operon, the operon is positively regulated by the regulatory protein. an operon regulated by a repressor is therefore negatively regulated, because the presence of the active repressor prevents transcription of that operon. in contrast, an operon regulated by an activator is positively regulated, because in its active state the activator protein turns on transcription of the operon under its control. the lac operon of E. coli repressor(lac repressor) is synthesized through the activity of the gene lac I, known as regulator gene. the active form of the lac repressor, is a tetramer that contains four copies of the gene I product. in the absence of the inducer, the repressor binds to the lac operator sequence, preventing RNA polymerase from binding to the promoter and transcribing the structural genes. thus the lac operon is negatively regulated associated with the lac operon, there is another site, 16 base pairs upstream of the promoter, which is used for a positive control of the gene expression. this site is called catabolic activator protein site or cyclic AMP(cAMP) protein site or catabolite gene activator(cga) site, because it is utilized for binding of CAP or cga to stimulate gene expression. CAP can bind to this site only when it is bound with cAMP. by binding to it, the CAP-cAMP complex exerts a positive control over the transcription process. it has an effect exactly opposite to that of repressor binding to an operator. yhe effector molecule cAMP determines the effect of CAP on lac operon transcription. presence of glucose inhibits the formation of cAMP and prevents it to bind to CAP