Hereditary profiles of disorderly transcription?

Background  

Microscopic examination of living cells often reveals that cells from some cell strains appear to be in a permanent state of disarray without obvious reason. In all probability such a disorderly state affects cell functioning.     

Blockers and barriers to transcription: competing activities?

In the eukaryotic cell active and inactive genes reside adjacent to one another and are modulated by numerous regulatory elements. Insulator elements prevent the misregulation of adjacent genes by restricting the effects of the regulatory elements to specific domains. Enhancer blockers prevent enhancers from inadvertently activating neighboring genes, and recent results suggest that they might function by a conserved mechanism across species. These elements appear to disrupt enhancer-promoter "communications" by interacting with the regulatory elements and sequestering these elements into specific regions of the nucleus thus rendering them non-functional. Barrier elements insulate active genes from neighboring heterochromatin and recent results suggest that they function by specific localized recruitment of acetyltransferases that antagonize the spread of heterochromatin-associated deacetylases, thus preventing the propagation of heterochromatin.