Promoter Analysis: Gene Regulatory Motif Identification with A-GLAM

Reliable detection of cis-regulatory elements in promoter regions is a difficult and unsolved problem in computational biology. The intricacy of transcriptional regulation in higher eukaryotes, primarily in metazoans, could be a major driving force of organismal complexity. Eukaryotic genome annotations have improved greatly due to large-scale characterization of full-length cDNAs, transcriptional start sites (TSSs), and comparative genomics. Regulatory elements are identified in promoter regions using a variety of enumerative or alignment-based methods. Here we present a survey of recent computational methods for eukaryotic promoter analysis and describe the use of an alignment-based method implemented in the A-GLAM program.