MATHEMATICAL-MODEL TO PREDICT REGIONS OF CHROMATIN ATTACHMENT TO THE NUCLEAR MATRIX

The potentiation and subsequent initiation of transcription are comple x biological phenomena, The region of attachment of the chromatin fibe r to the nuclear matrix, known as the matrix attachment region or scaf fold attachment region (MAR or SAR), are thought to be requisite for t he transcriptional regulation of the eukaryotic genome, As expressed s equences should be contained in these regions, it becomes significant to answer the following question: can these regions be identified from the primary sequence data alone and subsequently used as markers for expressed sequences? This paper represents an effort toward achieving this goal and describes a mathematical model for the detection of MARs , The location of matrix associated regions has been linked to a varie ty of sequence patterns, Consequently, a list of these patterns is com piled and represented as a set of decision rules using an ANP-OR formu lation, The DNA sequence was then searched for the presence of these p atterns and a statistical significance was associated with the frequen cy of occurrence of the various patterns, Subsequently, a mathematical potential value, MAR-Potential, was assigned to a sequence region as the inverse proportion to the probability that the observed pattern po pulation occurred at random, Such a MAR detection process was applied to the analysis of a variety of known MAR containing sequences, Region s of matrix association predicted by the software essentially correspo nd to those determined experimentally, The human T-cell receptor and t he DNA sequence from the Drosophila bithorax region were also analyzed , This demonstrates the usefulness of the approach described as a mean s to direct experimental resources.