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The Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD) is an annotated, non-redundant collection of eukaryotic Pol II promoters, for which the transcription start site has been determined experimentally. Access to promoter sequences is provided by pointers to positions in nucleotide sequence entries. The annotation part of an entry includes a description of the initiation site mapping data, exhaustive cross-references to the EMBL nucleotide sequence database, SWISS-PROT, TRANSFAC and other databases, as well as bibliographic references. EPD is structured in a way that facilitates dynamic extraction of biologically meaningful promoter subsets for comparative sequence analysis. World Wide Web-based interfaces have been developed which enable the user to view EPD entries in different formats, to select and extract promoter sequences according to a variety of criteria, and to navigate to related databases exploiting different cross-references. The EPD web site also features yearly updated base frequency matrices for major eukaryotic promoter elements. EPD can be accessed at http://www.epd.isb-sib.ch.

Publisher Summary This chapter introduces gene feature prediction methods for the nonprotein-coding part of the genome, including tools to detect RNA genes. Sequence-defined features are exclusively defined by information contained in the sequence itself and are not subject to experimental verification. The compositional properties of DNA sequences include DNA base composition and short oligomer distributions up to the hexanucleotide level. Compositional properties have also been used in gene prediction to distinguish introns from coding exons. The two types of sequence alignment algorithms are commonly distinguished which include global and local. A global algorithm attempts to align two sequences over their entire lengths, regardless of whether there is any similarity at all in a particular region. A local alignment algorithm searches for matching segments between two sequences. Sequence alignment algorithms are often used to compare a query sequence against a large sequence database. It is found that weight matrices are more flexible descriptors of degenerate sequence motifs which can account for varying degrees of severity of base substitutions in a functional element.

Background The comparison of complete genomes has revealed surprisingly large numbers of conserved non-protein-coding (CNC) DNA regions. However, the biological function of CNC remains elusive. CNC differ in two aspects from conserved protein-coding regions. They are not conserved across phylum boundaries, and they do not contain readily detectable sub-domains. Here we characterize the persistence length and time of CNC and conserved protein-coding regions in the vertebrate and insect lineages. Results The persistence length is the length of a genome region over which a certain level of sequence identity is consistently maintained. The persistence time is the evolutionary period during which a conserved region evolves under the same selective constraints. Our main findings are: (i) Insect genomes contain 1.60 times less conserved information than vertebrates; (ii) Vertebrate CNC have a higher persistence length than conserved coding regions or insect CNC; (iii) CNC have shorter persistence times as compared to conserved coding regions in both lineages. Conclusion Higher persistence length of vertebrate CNC indicates that the conserved information in vertebrates and insects is organized in functional elements of different lengths. These findings might be related to the higher morphological complexity of vertebrates and give clues about the structure of active CNC elements. Shorter persistence time might explain the previously puzzling observations of highly conserved CNC within each phylum, and of a lack of conservation between phyla. It suggests that CNC divergence might be a key factor in vertebrate evolution. Further evolutionary studies will help to relate individual CNC to specific developmental processes.

Background Zinc Finger Nucleases (ZFNs) are man-made restriction enzymes useful for manipulating genomes by cleaving target DNA sequences. ZFNs allow therapeutic gene correction or creation of genetically modified model organisms. ZFN specificity is not absolute; therefore, it is essential to select ZFN target sites without similar genomic off-target sites. It is important to assay for off-target cleavage events at sites similar to the target sequence. Results ZFN-Site is a web interface that searches multiple genomes for ZFN off-target sites. Queries can be based on the target sequence or can be expanded using degenerate specificity to account for known ZFN binding preferences. ZFN off-target sites are outputted with links to genome browsers, facilitating off-target cleavage site screening. We verified ZFN-Site using previously published ZFN half-sites and located their target sites and their previously described off-target sites. While we have tailored this tool to ZFNs, ZFN-Site can also be used to find potential off-target sites for other nucleases, such as TALE nucleases. Conclusions ZFN-Site facilitates genome searches for possible ZFN cleavage sites based on user-defined stringency limits. ZFN-Site is an improvement over other methods because the FetchGWI search engine uses an indexed search of genome sequences for all ZFN target sites and possible off-target sites matching the half-sites and stringency limits. Therefore, ZFN-Site does not miss potential off-target sites.