Includes bibliographical references and index.

Where it begins : an overview of promoter recognition and open complex formation / Stephen Busby, Annie Kolb and Henri Buc -- Opening the DNA at the promoter : the energetic challenge / Bianca Sclavi -- Intrinsic in vivo modulators : negative supercoiling and the constituents of the bacterial nucleoid / Georgi Muskhelishvili and Andrew Travers -- Transcription by RNA polymerases : from initiation to elongation, translocation and strand separation / Thomas A. Steitz -- Single-molecule FRET analysis of the path from transcription initiation to elongation / Achillefs N. Kapanidis and Shimon Weiss -- Real-time detection of DNA unwinding by Escherichia coli RNAP : from transcription initiation to termination / Terence R. Strick and Andrey Revyakin -- The engine and the brake / Henri Buc and Terence Strick -- Substrate loading, nucleotide addition, and translocation by RNA polymerase / Jinwei Zhang and Robert Landick -- Regulation of RNA polymerase through its active center / Sergei Nechaev, Nikolay Zenkin and Konstantin Severinov -- Kinetic modeling of transcription elongation / Lu Bai, Alla Shundrovsky and Michelle D. Wang -- Mechanics of transcription termination / Evgeny Nudler -- Past, present, and future of single-molecule studies of transcription / Carlos Bustamante and Jeffrey R. Moffitt.