CIS-REGULATORY ELEMENT BASED GENE FINDING

AN APPLICATION IN ARABIDOPSIS THALIANA

Abstract

Using cis-regulatomry motifs known to regulate plant osmotic stress response, an artificial neural network model was built to identify other functionally releted genes in volved in the same process. The rationale behind our approach is that genc expression is largely controlled at the transcriptional level through the interactions between transcription factors and cis-regulatoery elments. Gene Ontology enrichment analysis on the 500 top-scoring predictions showed that, 60% of the enriched GO classification was related to stress response. RT-PCR analysis showed that nearly 70% of the top-scoring prediction esxhibited altered expression under variou stres streatments. We expec that similar approach is widely applicable to infer gene function in various cellular processes in different species.