Identifying Functional Elements by Comparative DNA Sequence Analysis
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-2350, USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Functional elements in DNA sequences tend to evolve at a much slower rate than nonfunctional sequences, because functional elements are subject to selective pressure. Comparative DNA sequence analysis exploits this local difference in mutation rates to identify functional elements such as genes, regulatory sequences, splice sites, and binding sites. This is accomplished by comparing orthologous sequences from two or more species and identifying those regions that are most well-conserved across the species. These conserved regions are excellent candidates for further experimentation. Such a comparative analysis is sometimes called “phylogenetic footprinting” (Tagle et al. 1988; for review, see Duret and Bucher 1997).
In this issue, Cliften et al. (2001) report the results of one such comparative study. Their study, focusing on the yeastSaccharomyces cerevisiae, had two separate goals. The first was to use orthologous sequences from seven other partially-sequencedSaccharomyces species to predict short protein-coding genes, RNA genes, …
