Since our ancestors first harnessed fire, we’ve used heat to cook burgers, forge steel and power rockets. Now, Rockefeller University researchers are using heat for another purpose: turning genes on and off at will. By exploiting the heat shock response, an ancient mechanism that protects cells from dangerously high temperatures, researchers have developed a new method to introduce foreign genes, called transgenes, into an organism and control when and where these transgenes are expressed. Unlike other techniques, which are labor intensive and inefficient, this new method makes controlling transgene expression as easy as turning the dial on an oven.
