生物信息学方法预测增强子及其作用位点综述

Review of bioinformatics methods for predicting enhancers and their targets

对于多细胞真核生物来说,细胞的特异性功能是十分重要的。这就要求在相同遗传物质的基础上,细胞能够通过不同的基因表达模式来适应环境的变化。基因表达调控的因素有很多,近年来随着对基因组非编码区的研究,发现了一些非编码的DNA序列对于基因表达调控具有重要意义。增强子是对基因表达调控具有重要作用的非编码序列元件之一。一些增强子能够通过转录产生具有调控功能的RNA,也被称为增强子RNA(enhancer RNA,eRNA)。因此对于增强子的序列特征、作用位点以及在特定时间和特定组织中表达模式的研究成为了基因表达调控领域的一个重要问题。

Specific function of cells is very important for multicellular eukaryotes.Despite the same genetic material,cells can adapt to environment changes through different gene expression patterns.There are many factors in gene expression regulation.In recent years,with the study of genomic non-coding region,it has been found that some non-coding DNA sequences are important for gene expression regulation.Enhancers are one of the non-coding sequence components that play an important role in gene expression regulation.Some enhancers can be transcribed into RNA with regulatory function,also known as enhancer RNA(eRNA).Therefore,the study on enhancer sequence features,target genes,and expression patterns in specific time and specific tissues has become an important issue in the field of gene expression regulation.