GENOMIC POSITION ANALYSES AND THE TRANSCRIPTION MACHINERY

Position analyses have been devised to extract additional transcriptio nal information from rapidly expanding genomic data bases. The locatio ns of promoter regulatory sites and also the locations of transcriptio n factor DNA-binding domains are analyzed. Strongly preferred position s of activator binding sites occur in both Escherichia coli and eukary otes, suggesting specific common features of transcription in the two systems. In both systems, regulatory proteins are found to have their DNA-binding domains near termini and the data suggest an evolutionary analysis that complements a phylogenetic analysis based on sequence al ignments. The results indicate that positional information can be an i mportant adjunct to sequence comparisons in analyzing genomic informat ion. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.