Editor's Summary

31 January 2008

Expression patterns

For developmental biologists, Drosophila embryo segmentation is the standard model for the study of body pattern formation. It is a well characterized system, yet one area where information is sparse is transcriptional control — the mechanisms that establish complex expression patterns at precise times and locations. A new computational framework described in this issue goes a long way towards filling this gap. The algorithm takes as input the DNA binding specificities and expression levels of key transcription factors and predicts the expression level that any given cis-regulatory sequence will produce at every spatial position along the antero-posterior axis of the embryo. The algorithm is generally applicable, so may prove useful for many other protein–DNA interaction systems.

Article: Predicting expression patterns from regulatory sequence in Drosophila segmentation

Eran Segal, Tali Raveh-Sadka, Mark Schroeder, Ulrich Unnerstall & Ulrike Gaul

doi:10.1038/nature06496

Abstract | Full Text | PDF (818K) | Supplementary information