The Escherichia coli lac operon promoter is widely used as a tool to control recombinant protein production in bacteria. Here, we give a brief review of how it functions, how it is regulated, and how, based on this knowledge, a suite of lac promoter derivatives has been developed to give a controlled expression that is suitable for diverse biotechnology applications.
Keywords: Escherichia coli; bacterial transcription initiation; lac promoter; lac repressor; recombinant protein production; tac promoter.
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Portland Press Limited on behalf of the Biochemical Society.