Tiffany Roby et al. (2002) Mid-west Worm Meeting "Defining Regulatory Regions In Nematode Muscle Genes By Computational And Transgenic Studies."

Gary Stormo, Lawrence Schriefer, Robert Waterston, Tiffany Roby, Michelle Hresko, Debraj GuhaThakurta

[Mid-west Worm Meeting, 2002]

We have initiated experiments designed to understand the regulatory regions of C. elegans genes using known muscle genes of C. elegans as a model(1). Our primary approach is to use a combination of computational methods to identify potential muscle specific regulatory elements from the known set of C. elegans muscle genes. Local multiple sequence alignment methods like Consensus(1), Ann-Spec(2), and Co-Bind(3) are being used to identify these potential regulatory elements. Using the above method we have already identified several potential regulatory elements that show high degree of specificity for the muscle genes. The regulatory elements that these computational methods predict can then be used to screen the C. elegansgenome for new genes that are expressed in muscle cells.