SEARCHING FOR REGULATORY ELEMENTS IN HUMAN NONCODING SEQUENCES

Important progress has been made in the past two years in the identifi cation of Pol II promoters, For most other regulatory elements, howeve r, current biological knowledge is still insufficient to allow the dev elopment of prediction tools. The phylogenetic-footprinting strategy, which is based on the comparative analysis of homologous sequences, is a very efficient approach to identify new unknown regulatory elements . The recent organization of large-scale sequencing projects for some model vertebrate organisms will be extremely valuable for the predicti on of regulatory elements in the human genome. (C) Current Biology Ltd .