Comparative Sequence Analysis of Human and Mouse Promoter Regions

The DNA sequence just adjacent to the transcriptional start sites (TSSs), what we call the promoter, plays an important role in transcription regulation. Although many attempts have been made to detect functional signals in promoter regions aiming to understand the mechanisms of transcription regulation, those attempts remain challenges because the grammars or semantics of promoter sequences are not fully unveiled. The completion of genome sequences has made the large scale genomic comparison an effective tool for mining the signals from genome sequences. In addition, experimentally validated TSS data has been accumulating in these years [1], which made possible the comparisons of the promoter sequences [2]. The TSS data are especially abundant for human and mouse. In this study, we carried out the most comprehensive comparison to date for promoter regions of human and mouse, and the relationship between gene function and promoter conservation were examined.