Collection and Analysis of Eukaryotic Promoter Regions: DBTSS (DataBase of Transcriptional Start Sites)

Recent determination of human and mouse draft genome sequences should be the landmarks for the post-sequencing era. One of the major challenges in this era is the interpretation of the promoter regions. To this end, precise identification of the transcriptional start sites (TSSs) is essential. However, such an information cannot be obtained from usual cDNA or EST data. Although Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD) contains reliable data, the number of the data is about 1400, which is not enough for global promoter analysis. To overcome this problem, we have constructed a database, DBTSS [3], which contains the information of a number of 5’-end sequences produced by the oligo-capping method and mapped onto the genome sequence. The oligo-capping method enables the precise determination of the 5’ ends of mRNAs [2, 4]. Here we report a major extension in its ver.3: support of the data of multiple species (human, mouse, and nematode). It contains not only the information of each TSS of these species but also the local sequence similarity between the upstream regions of their orthologous genes.