Written by Lauren Suarez
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It's 1961, John F. Kennedy has been inaugurated as president, the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba has failed, and the hippie movement of peace and free love is beginning (American Cultural History). Inside a lab, after long hard hours, two French scientists have made a discovery that will surely send the scientific community reeling! After studying the lactose metabolic system in great detail Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod have come up with a name for their researched system: the OPERON (operon). As the first to name this system, the two men would later win a Nobel Prize in 1985 for their hard work(operon). The operon is defined as a “cluster of genes, the expressions of which are regulated together by operator-repressor protein interactions plus the operator region itself and the promoter” (Russell 441-458). For a specific group of genes, their regulation or expression is dependent upon the actions of a promoter and an operator. Since its naming the operon, has been studied in great detail. The operon system is mainly found in prokaryotes and bacteriophages. There are various operons to study, but the most commonly used are the lactose and arabinose operons in E.coli and in bacteriophages such as lambda (Russell 441-458). This presentation will address the basic ideas of the operon, and take a closer look at two operons; the Lactose and Arabinose operons in order to compare and contrast the two systems.