Cartwheel: Tools for Regulatory Genomics

Understanding gene regulation in detail is a goal of both developmental biology and microbial physiology, yet computational tools for investigating the function of non-coding sequence remain relatively immature. Simple, intuitive, and powerful tools that allow individual bench biologists to explore regulatory function in genomic sequence can dramatically increase experimental productivity by both generating and eliminating hypotheses. However, there are very few computational tools that let biologists generate and test hypotheses about regulatory function, even though the opportunities to integrate genomic evidence with experimental design are growing rapidly with the increasing number of sequenced genomes. In particular, there is a growing body of techniques used to predict regulatory DNA and transcription factor/DNA interactions that is essentially unusable by individual biology investigators.