ITR: Discovering Regulatory Elements in Biological Sequences

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

An important and challenging question currently facing biologists is the identification of binding sites in DNA. These regulatory elements are for the proteins that are involved in the regulation of genes. The appropriate computational tools can be extremely valuable for pruning the search space of experiments, efficiently suggesting potential regulatory elements on which to focus limited laboratory resources. As more related genomes are sequenced and our understanding of regulatory relationships among genes, improves, a novel problem arises that is addressed here. Namely, the data to be analyzed will often be heterogeneous, a collection of co-regulated genes from one species together with their orthologous, i.e., corresponding, genes in several related species. This project will design, implement, and test algorithms for this novel problem and related issues in the discovery of regulatory elements. All software will be made freely available on the Internet.