Sequence alignment between remotely related proteins has been one of the more difficult problems in structural biology. Improvements have been achieved by incorporating information that enhances the diversity of the substitution matrices. NdPASA is a web-based server that opti ...

The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between protein or nucleotide sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence in a database and calculates the statistical significance of the matches. This chapter first pr ...

We present a method to predict cis-acting elements for a given gene by detecting over-represented motifs in promoters of a set of ortholo gous genes in prokaryotes (single-gene, multiple-genomes approach). The method has been used successfully to detect regulatory elements at various ta ...

Discovery of transcription factor binding sites is a crucial and challenging problem in bioinformatics. Several computational tools have been developed for this problem, popularly known as the motif-finding problem. PhyME is an ab initio motif-finding algorithm, which finds over ...

Bioinformatic and experimental analyses of promoter regions are available for a long time. Finding of the transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), however, by either method still faces a number of problems. For example, because of the ambiguity of binding of transcription factors, the ...

Here, we describe the usage of Fastcompare, a simple and efficient comparative approach for finding short noncoding DNA (e.g., transcription factor binding sites) and mRNA (e.g., microRNA target sites) sequences that are globally conserved between two genomes. Fastcompare is based on the ...

We present a method to predict cis-acting elements by detecting over-represented motifs in promoters of a set of coregulated genes (single-genome, multigenes approach). The method has been used successfully to detect regulating elements in bacteria and yeast. It can be used with higher or ...

Phylogenetic footprinting is powerful technique for finding functional elements from sequence data. Functional elements are thought to have greater sequence constraint than nonfunctional elements, and, thus, undergo a slower rate of sequence change through time. Phylogene ...

The Gibbs Motif Sampler (Gibbs) is a software package used to predict conserved elements in biopolymer sequences. Although the software can be used to locate conserved motifs in protein sequences, its most common use is the prediction of transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) in promot ...

PhyloGibbs is a program that uses Gibbs sampling to predict putative binding sites for transcription factors in DNA. It has two notable advances over previous algorithms for this task: it handles phylogenetically related sequence systematically, and it evaluates the significance of ...

Transcription regulation on a gene-by-gene basis is achieved through transcription factors, the DNA-binding proteins that recognize short DNA sequences in the proximity of the genes. Unlike other DNA-binding proteins, each transcription factor recognizes a number of sequences, ...

Prediction of transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) is commonly used to formulate working hypotheses for experimental studies on gene regulation. Computational identification of functional TFBS is complicated because of short length and degeneracy of sequence motifs re ...

RNA genes are ubiquitous in the cell and are involved in a number of biochemical processes. Because there is a close relationship between function and structure, software tools that predict the secondary structure of noncoding RNAs from the base sequence are very helpful. In this article, we foc ...

Codon usage and context are biased in open reading frames (ORFs) of most genomes. Codon usage is largely influenced by biased genome G+C pressure, in particular in prokaryotes, but the general rules that govern the evolution of codon context remain largely elusive. To shed new light into this quest ...

sRNAs are small noncoding RNAs that have been shown to perform diverse regulatory roles in a number of prokaryotes. Although several bioinformatic approaches have proven effective in identifying bacterial sRNAs, implementing these approaches presents significant computat ...

The function of many noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) depend on a defined secondary structure. RNAz detects evolutionarily conserved and thermodynamically stable RNA secondary structures in multiple sequence alignments and, thus, efficiently filters for candidate ncRNAs. In this cha ...

Multiple alignments of RNAs are an essential prerequisite to further analyses such as homology modeling, motif description, or illustration of conserved or variable binding sites. Beyond the comparison of RNAs on the sequence level, structural conformations determined by basepa ...

DNA microarray technology has advanced rapidly since the first use of cDNA microarrays almost a decade ago. For gene expression studies on organisms, for which the genomes have been sequenced, cDNA microarrays are being gradually replaced by gene-specific oligonucleotide microarr ...

The concept of DNA arrays was first introduced in the early 1980s, by Sir Edwin Southern. Since then, many research institutions and biotechnology companies have investigated the potential use of arrays in fields ranging from genetic diagnostics to forensics investigations. A 64-chan ...

Copy-number polymorphisms at specific genomic loci have been implicated in numerous human and animal disease phenotypes. Multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA) is a molecular genetic technique allowing targeted quantification of genomic copy-number ...