Strategies for characterising cis-regulatory elements in Xenopus

Understanding the cis-regulatory architecture of metazoan organisms is the greatest challenge facing genome biology today. In vertebrate organisms, distinct sequence elements mediate transcriptional regulation and are scattered throughout the genome, either proximal or distal to promoters. The ident...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Briefings in functional genomics & proteomics 2005-05, Vol.4 (1), p.58-68
Main Authors: Khokha, Mustafa K, Loots, Gabriela G
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Animals, Genetically Modified
Cell Nucleus - metabolism
Computational Biology
DNA Transposable Elements - genetics
Enhancer Elements, Genetic
Genetic Techniques
Genomics
Humans
Mice
Microscopy, Fluorescence
Models, Genetic
Muscles - metabolism
Organisms
Promoter Regions, Genetic
Rodents
Software
Transgenes
Transgenic animals
Vertebrates
Xenopus - genetics
Xenopus laevis
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Understanding the cis-regulatory architecture of metazoan organisms is the greatest challenge facing genome biology today. In vertebrate organisms, distinct sequence elements mediate transcriptional regulation and are scattered throughout the genome, either proximal or distal to promoters. The identification of transcriptional enhancers has proven rather difficult by conventional experimental approaches. In the past decade, the rapid generation of genomic sequences for multiple vertebrate organisms, accompanied by sophisticated comparative tools, has facilitated the identification of non-coding evolutionarily conserved regions that may encode cis-regulatory elements. Validating computational predictions and characterising cis-regulatory elements in vivo, however, has been a major bottleneck, mainly because the most commonly used organism for these experiments has been the mouse, and generating transgenic mice or modifying the mouse genome continues to be a labour-intensive, low-throughput, expensive process. This has led to the use of Xenopus, which holds great promise for high-throughput interrogation of putative cis-regulatory elements. In particular, Xenopus tropicalis may become particularly powerful for elucidating regulatory networks, chiefly because it is amenable to genetic manipulations, and its genome is being sequenced.
ISSN:1473-9550
2041-2649
1477-4062
2041-2657
DOI:10.1093/bfgp/4.1.58