Comparative genomic analysis of transcription regulation elements involved in human map kinase G-protein coupling pathway.

The identification of cis-elements (motifs) in the regulatory regions of higher eukaryotes is an important and challenging problem in computational biology. Eukaryotic transcriptional regulatory mechanisms pose several difficulties for promoter analysis: including a high variance in the motif locations, frequently large divergence from motif consensus patterns, and a large amount of repetitive elements (confusing to many motif finding procedures). One promising approach to this difficult problem involves cross-species comparison. In this work we analyzed the full-length regulatory regions of genes involved in the G-protein coupling MAP kinase pathway and compared the results with ribosomal genes using human, mouse and rat genomic data. We found 19 high likely transcription factors (TFs) candidates for MAPK and 12 TFs for the ribosomal dataset. In the case of the MAPK dataset, regulatory regions of genes functionally grouped as receptors and MAP-core genes were found mostly highly conserved across the three species.