Participant Abstracts

From IPCMeeting042008

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ANALYSIS OF PLANT PROMOTERS Yoshiharu Y. Yamamoto, Center for Gene Research, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8602, Japan, yyoshi@gene.nagoya-u.ac.jp

Promoters are made of the regulatory domain and the core promoter region. The former directs tissue-specificity or timing of gene expression. The latter provides basis for transcription, and determines position, direction, and strength of transcriptional initiation. TATA box and Initiator are famous core promoter elements in plants as well, but they are found only in a limited number of plant promoters. For the majority of plant promoters, there were no recognizable core elements and thus did not understand why transcription occurs at these regions. Our promoter analysis is composed of two parts: bioinformatics and large scale experiments. The bioinformatics approach revealed several novel core promoter elements from plants, together with hundreds of known and putative cis-regulatory elements (1, 2, and unpublished results). The extracted elements are utilized to prepare Plant Promoter DataBase, ppdb (3, 4). As for the experimental part, we developed a novel method for large scale identification of transcription start sites with the aid of the ultra parallel sequencer. Our combinatorial analysis revealed that promoters with different core elements are associated with different expression characteristics. I hope I can help some of the Grand Challenges with my research activity.

1) Yamamoto et al. (2007) BMC Genomics 8:67; 2) Yamamoto et al. (2007) Nucleic Acids Res 35, 6219; 3) Yamamoto & Obokata. (2008) Nucleic Acids Res 36, D977; 4) http://ppdb.gene.nagoya-u.ac.jp