PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Liya, Devang Haresh
AU  - Elanchezhian, Mirudula
AU  - Pahari, Mukulika
AU  - Anand, Nithishwer Mouroug
AU  - Suresh, Shivani
AU  - Balaji, Nivedha
AU  - Jainarayanan, Ashwin Kumar
TI  - QPromoters: Sequence based prediction of promoter strength in <em>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</em>
AID  - 10.1101/2021.04.27.441621
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.04.27.441621
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/28/2021.04.27.441621.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/28/2021.04.27.441621.full
AB  - Promoters play a key role in influencing transcriptional regulation for fine-tuning expression of genes. Heterologous promoter engineering has been a widely used concept to control the level of transcription in all model organisms. The strength of a promoter is mainly determined by its nucleotide composition. Many promoter libraries have been curated but few have attempted to develop theoretical methods to predict the strength of promoters from its nucleotide sequence.Such theoretical methods are not only valuable in the design of promoters with specified strength, but are also meaningful to understand the mechanism of promoters in gene transcription. In this study, we present a theoretical model to describe the relationship between promoter strength and nucleotide sequence in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We infer from our analysis that the −49 to 10 sequence with respect to the Transcription Start Site represents the minimal region that can be used to predict the promoter strength. We present an online tool https://qpromoters.com/ that takes advantage of this fact to quickly quantify the strength of the promoters.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.