Studies of the β-globin gene promoter illustrate the power of phylogenetic footprinting, and the importance of species choice in that analysis. (a) Transcription factor analysis of the human promoter without footprinting reveals numerous predictions, most of which are biologically irrelevant. (b) Comparison with the chicken promoter fails to detect conserved sites, but comparison with the mouse promoter does (c), including a documented GATA-binding site (boxed). (d) Comparison with the cow promoter identifies still more conserved sites, but comparison with the Macaque monkey promoter (e) is little better than no filtering at all. (Reprinted with permission, B. Lenhard et al.,
Scientists know that the regulatory elements that guide and control gene expression, for the most part, lie not within coding sequences but outside and between them. Now researchers are taking their search for these sequences genome-wide. And with hundreds of completed genomes in hand, and still more ...
