Homeobox

A highly conserved 180 bp DNA sequence that controls body part-, organ- or tissue-specific gene expression, most particularly involved in segmentation in animals (e.g. development of antennae or legs of Drosophila melanogaster ), but also in a variety of other eukaryotes . It encodes a DNA-binding region, the homeodomain, which acts as a transcription factor.

A short stretch of nucleotides whose base sequence is virtually identical in all the genes that contain it. Homeoboxes have been found in many organisms from fruit flies to human beings. In the fruit fly, a homeobox appears to determine when particular groups of genes are expressed during development.