Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về sinh học được đăng trên tạp chí sinh học Journal of Biology đề tài: Of mice and men: phylogenetic footprinting aids the discovery of regulatory elements. | J. Biol. Journal of Biology BioMed Central Minireview Of mice and men phylogenetic footprinting aids the discovery of regulatory elements Zhaolei Zhang and Mark Gerstein Address Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Yale University 266 Whitney Avenue New Haven CT 06520-8114 USA. Correspondence Mark Gerstein. E-mail Published 6 June 2003 Journal of Biology 2003 2 11 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at http content 2 2 11 2003 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract Phylogenetic footprinting is an approach to finding functionally important sequences in the genome that relies on detecting their high degrees of conservation across different species. A new study shows how much it improves the prediction of gene-regulatory elements in the human genome. It has been a great challenge for biologists to understand the complicated and often myriad mechanisms of gene regulation. The recent success of genome sequencing projects 1 2 combined with very effective gene-prediction algorithms has generated abundant gene sequences but our understanding of gene regulation has remained very limited. In human and other higher eukaryotes gene expression is modulated by the binding of various transcription factors onto Cis-regulatory regions of a gene. Binding of different combinations of transcription factors may result in a gene being expressed in different tissue types or at different developmental stages. To fully understand a gene s function therefore it is essential to identify the transcription factors that regulate the gene and the corresponding transcription-factor-binding sites TFBSs within the DNA sequence. Traditionally these regulatory sites were determined by labor-intensive wet-lab techniques such as DNAse footprinting or gel-shift assays 3 several online databases such as TRRD COMPEL and TRANSFAC 4 5 have been constructed to store experimentally determined TFBSs. Now Lenhard and colleagues
