Skip to main content

In silico Identification of Eukaryotic Promoters

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Systems and Synthetic Biology

Abstract

The identification of promoters is essential for complete annotation of genomes and better understanding of gene regulatory networks. Experimental methods for promoter identification are costly, time-consuming and labor intensive. Hence, in silico methods are an attractive alternative. Computational methods for promoter prediction methods are easy, fast and can provide reliable results. A promoter prediction algorithm identifies promoter regions based on the idea that, promoter regions are different from other genomic regions in their features (sequence, context and structure). Promoter prediction algorithms are broadly classified as ab initio, hybrid and homology-based, depending on the information used for model design. The different approaches used in promoter prediction are briefly described here.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Abeel T, Saeys Y, Bonnet E, Rouze P, Van de Peer Y (2008a) Generic eukaryotic core promoter prediction using structural features of DNA. Genome Res 18(2):310–323

    Google Scholar 

  • Abeel T, Saeys Y, Rouze P, Van de Peer Y (2008b) ProSOM: core promoter prediction based on unsupervised clustering of DNA physical profiles. Bioinformatics 24(13):24–31

    Google Scholar 

  • Abeel T, Van de Peer Y, Saeys Y (2009) Toward a gold standard for promoter prediction evaluation. Bioinformatics 25(12):i313–i320

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Audic S, Claverie JM (1997) Detection of eukaryotic promoters using Markov transition matrices. Comput Chem 21(4):223–227

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bajic VB, Seah SH (2003) Dragon gene start finder: an advanced system for finding approximate locations of the start of gene transcriptional units. Genome Res 13(8):1923–1929

    CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bajic VB, Seah SH, Chong A, Zhang G, Koh JL, Brusic V (2002) Dragon Promoter Finder: recognition of vertebrate RNA polymerase II promoters. Bioinformatics 18(1):198–199

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bajic VB, Tan SL, Suzuki Y, Sugano S (2004) Promoter prediction analysis on the whole human genome. Nat Biotechnol 22(11):1467–1473

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bajic VB, Brent MR, Brown RH, Frankish A, Harrow J, Ohler U, Solovyev VV, Tan SL (2006) Performance assessment of promoter predictions on ENCODE regions in the EGASP experiment. Genome Biol 7(Suppl 1):1–13

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bucher P (1990) Weight matrix descriptions of four eukaryotic RNA polymerase II promoter elements derived from 502 unrelated promoter sequences. J Mol Biol 212(4):563–578

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Carninci P, Sandelin A, Lenhard B, Katayama S, Shimokawa K, Ponjavic J, Semple CA, Taylor MS, Engstrom PG, Frith MC, Forrest AR, Alkema WB, Tan SL, Plessy C, Kodzius R, Ravasi T, Kasukawa T, Fukuda S, Kanamori-Katayama M, Kitazume Y, Kawaji H, Kai C, Nakamura M, Konno H, Nakano K, Mottagui-Tabar S, Arner P, Chesi A, Gustincich S, Persichetti F, Suzuki H, Grimmond SM, Wells CA, Orlando V, Wahlestedt C, Liu ET, Harbers M, Kawai J, Bajic VB, Hume DA, Hayashizaki Y (2006) Genome-wide analysis of mammalian promoter architecture and evolution. Nat Genet 38(6):626–635

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Davuluri RV, Grosse I, Zhang MQ (2001) Computational identification of promoters and first exons in the human genome. Nat Genet 29(4):412–417

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Down TA, Hubbard TJ (2002) Computational detection and location of transcription start sites in mammalian genomic DNA. Genome Res 12(3):458–461

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fickett JW, Hatzigeorgiou AG (1997) Eukaryotic promoter recognition. Genome Res 7(9):861–878

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fickett JW, Wasserman WW (2000) Discovery and modeling of transcriptional regulatory regions. Curr Opin Biotechnol 11(1):19–24

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gangal R, Sharma P (2005) Human pol II promoter prediction: time series descriptors and machine learning. Nucleic Acids Res 33(4):1332–1336

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Goni JR, Perez A, Torrents D, Orozco M (2007) Determining promoter location based on DNA structure first-principles calculations. Genome Biol 8(12):R263

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gupta R, Wikramasinghe P, Bhattacharyya A, Perez FA, Pal S, Davuluri RV (2010) Annotation of gene promoters by integrative data-mining of ChIP-seq Pol-II enrichment data. BMC Bioinformatics 11Suppl 1:S65

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hutchinson GB (1996) The prediction of vertebrate promoter regions using differential hexamer frequency analysis. Comput Appl Biosci 12(5):391–398

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ioshikhes IP, Zhang MQ (2000) Large-scale human promoter mapping using CpG islands. Nat Genet 26(1):61–63

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Juven-Gershon T, Hsu JY, Theisen JW, Kadonaga JT (2008) The RNA polymerase II core promoter—the gateway to transcription. Curr Opin Cell Biol 20(3):253–259

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Knudsen S (1999) Promoter2.0: for the recognition of PolII promoter sequences. Bioinformatics 15(5):356–361

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lenhard B, Sandelin A, Carninci P (2012) Metazoan promoters: emerging characteristics and insights into transcriptional regulation. Nat Rev Genet 13(4):233–245

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Levitsky VG, Katokhin AV (2003) Recognition of eukaryotic promoters using a genetic algorithm based on iterative discriminant analysis. In Silico Biol 3(1-2):81–87

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Li X, Zeng J, Yan H (2008) PCA-HPR: a principle component analysis model for human promoter recognition. Bioinformation 2(9):373–378

    Article  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Morey C, Mookherjee S, Rajasekaran G, Bansal M (2011) DNA free energy-based promoter prediction and comparative analysis of Arabidopsis and rice genomes. Plant Physiol 156(3):1300–1315

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ohler U (2000) Promoter prediction on a genomic scale—the Adh experience. Genome Res 10(4):539–542

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ohler U, Niemann H (2001) Identification and analysis of eukaryotic promoters: recent computational approaches. Trends Genet 17(2):56–60

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ohler U, Liao GC, Niemann H, Rubin GM (2002) Computational analysis of core promoters in the Drosophila genome. Genome Biol 3(12):RESEARCH0087

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pedersen AG, Baldi P, Chauvin Y, Brunak S (1998) DNA structure in human RNA polymerase II promoters. J Mol Biol 281(4):663–673

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Pedersen AG, Baldi P, Chauvin Y, Brunak S (1999) The biology of eukaryotic promoter prediction—a review. Comput Chem 23(3–4):191–207

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ponger L, Mouchiroud D (2002) CpGProD: identifying CpG islands associated with transcription start sites in large genomic mammalian sequences. Bioinformatics 18(4):631–633

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Prestridge DS (1995) Predicting Pol II promoter sequences using transcription factor binding sites. J Mol Biol 249(5):923–932

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Rangannan V, Bansal M (2010) High-quality annotation of promoter regions for 913 bacterial genomes. Bioinformatics 26(24):3043–3050

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Reese MG (2001) Application of a time-delay neural network to promoter annotation in the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Comput Chem 26(1):51–56

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sandelin A, Carninci P, Lenhard B, Ponjavic J, Hayashizaki Y, Hume DA (2007) Mammalian RNA polymerase II core promoters: insights from genome-wide studies. Nat Rev Genet 8(6):424–436

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • SantaLucia J (1998) A unified view of polymer, dumbbell, and oligonucleotide DNA nearest-neighbor thermodynamics. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 95(4):1460–1465

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Scherf M, Klingenhoff A, Werner T (2000) Highly specific localization of promoter regions in large genomic sequences by PromoterInspector: a novel context analysis approach. J Mol Biol 297(3):599–606

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Schmid CD, Praz V, Delorenzi M, Perier R, Bucher P (2004) The Eukaryotic Promoter Database EPD: the impact of in silico primer extension. Nucleic Acids Res 32(Database issue):D82–D85

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Solovyev VV, Shahmuradov IA (2003) PromH: Promoters identification using orthologous genomic sequences. Nucleic Acids Res 31(13):3540–3545

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sonnenburg S, Zien A, Ratsch G (2006) ARTS: accurate recognition of transcription starts in human. Bioinformatics 22(14):e472–e480

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Suzuki Y, Yamashita R, Nakai K, Sugano S (2002) DBTSS: dataBase of human Transcriptional Start Sites and full-length cDNAs. Nucleic Acids Res 30(1):328–331

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Thomas MC, Chiang CM (2006) The general transcription machinery and general cofactors. Crit Rev Biochem Mol Biol 41(3):105–178

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Valen E, Sandelin A (2011) Genomic and chromatin signals underlying transcription start-site selection. Trends Genet 27(11):475–485

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wang J, Ungar LH, Tseng H, Hannenhalli S (2007) MetaProm: a neural network based meta-predictor for alternative human promoter prediction. BMC Genomics 8:374

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang J, Ma C, Zhou D, Zhang L, Zhou Y (2012) Accurately predicting transcription start sites using logitlinear model and local oligonucleotide frequencies. In: Bio-Inspired Computing and Applications, pp 107–114

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang X, Xuan Z, Zhao X, Li Y, Zhang MQ (2009) High-resolution human core-promoter prediction with CoreBoost\HM. Genome Res 19(2):266–275

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wingender E, Chen X, Hehl R, Karas H, Liebich I, Matys V, Meinhardt T, Pruss M, Reuter I, Schacherer F (2000) TRANSFAC: an integrated system for gene expression regulation. Nucleic Acids Res 28(1):316–319

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Xie X, Wu S, Lam KM, Yan H (2006) PromoterExplorer: an effective promoter identification method based on the AdaBoost algorithm. Bioinformatics 22(22):2722–2728

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Xu Z, Wei W, Gagneur J, Perocchi F, Clauder-Munster S, Camblong J, Guffanti E, Stutz F, Huber W, Steinmetz LM (2009) Bidirectional promoters generate pervasive transcription in yeast. Nature 457(7232):1033–1037

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Zeng J, Zhu S, Yan H (2009) Towards accurate human promoter recognition: a review of currently used sequence features and classification methods. Brief Bioinformatics 10(5):498–508

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Zeng J, Zhao XY, Cao XQ, Yan H (2010) SCS: signal, context, and structure features for genome-wide human promoter recognition. IEEE/ACM Trans Comput Biol Bioinform 7(3):550–562

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang MQ (2011) Computational promoter prediction in a vertebrate genome. In: Handbook of Statistical Bioinformatics, pp 73–85

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhao X, Xuan Z, Zhang MQ (2007) Boosting with stumps for predicting transcription start sites. Genome Biol 8(2):R17

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

MB is a recipient of the J. C. Bose National Fellowship of DST, India. We thank Rajasekaran for assistance in the preparation of Fig. 4.1.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manju Bansal .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Yella, V., Bansal, M. (2015). In silico Identification of Eukaryotic Promoters. In: Singh, V., Dhar, P. (eds) Systems and Synthetic Biology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9514-2_4

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics