小鼠核糖体蛋白基因中的组合转录调控元件分析

Analysis of Combinatorial Transcriptional Regulatory Elements in Mouse Ribosomal Protein Genes

研究表明,第一内含子可能参与基因转录调控。利用Markov链方法在小鼠核糖体蛋白(ribosomal protein)基因上游至第一内含子序列中抽提出一批高频出现模体(over-represented motifs),这些模体大部分与TRANSFAC中收集的小鼠基因转录因子结合位点吻合,是潜在的调控元件。将这些模体两两组合,利用超几何分布(hypergeometric distribution)和曼-惠特尼U检验(Mann-Whitney U test)获得了133对潜在转录调控模体对,其中一些与已知具有相互作用的转录因子对吻合,且大部分为协同作用。对抽提的模体对在不同区域中的出现情况进行分析,发现模体对主要出现在"上游-上游"(95.5%)和"上游-内含子"(57.9%)区域。结果进一步支持了内含子参与转录调控的假设,并且推测上游与内含子之间具有转录协同作用。

A lot of researches suggested that the first introns could play an important role in the transcription regulation of genes. In this paper, some over-represented motifs were extracted by Markov chain approach. Almost of the motifs were accordance with known transcriptional factor binding sites in TRANSFAC database and were potential regulatory elements. After pairing the over-represented motifs and using Hypergeometric distribution and Mann-Whitney U test, 133 potential combinatorial transcriptional regulatory motif pairs were detected the combinatorial regulation of these motif pairs had been verified by biological experiments and most of them are synergy. Checking the location preferences of detected motif pairs, we found that 95.5% and 57.9% of motif pairs prefer to ＂upstream-upstream＂ regions and ＂upstream-intron＂ regions, respectively these results provided more evidence for that the introns could take part in transcription regulation and speculate there are transcription synergy between introns and upstream regions.