In genetics and cell biology, repression is a mechanism often used to decrease or inhibit the expression of a gene. Removal of repression is called derepression. This mechanism may occur at different stages in the expression of a gene, with the result of increasing the overall RNA or protein products. Dysregulation of derepression mechanisms can result in altered gene expression patterns, which may lead to negative phenotypic consequences such as disease. Derepression of transcription Transcription can be repressed in a variety of ways, and therefore can be derepressed in different ways as well. A common mechanism is allosteric regulation. This is when a substrate binds a repressor protein and causes it to undergo a conformational change. If the repressor is bound upstream of a gene, such as in an operator sequence, then it would be repressing the gene's expression. This conformational change would take away the repressor’s ability to bind DNA, thus removing its repressive effect on transcription. Another form of transcriptional derepression uses chromatin remodeling complexes. For transcription to occur, RNA polymerase needs to have access to the promoter sequence of the gene or it cannot bind the DNA. Sometimes these sequences are wrapped around nucleosomes or are in condensed heterochromatin regions, and are therefore inaccessible. Through different chromatin remodeling mechanisms these promoter sequences can become accessible to the RNA polymerase, and transcription becomes derepressed. Transcriptional derepression may also occur at the level of transcription factor activation. Certain families of transcription factors are non-functional on their own because their active domains are blocked by another part of the protein. Substrate binding to this second, regulatory domain causes a conformational change in the protein to allows access to the active domain. This lets the transcription factor bind to DNA and serve its function, thus derepressing the transcription factor. Derepression of translation Derepression of translation increases protein production without altering the levels of mRNA in the cell. miRNAs are a common mechanism of translation repression, binding to the mRNA through complementary base pairing to silence them. Certain RNA binding proteins have been shown to target untranslated regions of the mRNAs and upregulate the translation initiation rates by alleviating the repressive miRNA effects. Example of derepression Auxin signalling An example is the auxin mediated derepression of the auxin response factor family of transcription factors in plants. These auxin response factors are repressed by Aux/IAA repressors. In the presence of auxin, these Aux/AII