Thank you very much for your help!
Hi guys!
I have the sequence (cDNA) of the "x" expressed gene. I would like to discover putative regulatory regions (ex: the promoter region) upstream to the expressed sequence but I have not the DNA sequence upstream to the expressed ones. I have two questions: how can I get the DNA sequence that may contain predicted regulatory elements and how can I predict computationally (through for example an alignment) the presence of putative regulatory motifs or generally speaking regulatory sequences? I'm new in this field.
Thank you very much
Best regards.
1 answer
If you have the co-ordinates of your gene e.g. your genes are in .bed format then fetch their upstream sequences with a simple awk command:
If 4th column is strand in your file
awk '{ if ($4=="+") print $1,$2-5000,$2; else print $1,$3,$3+5000}' OFS="\t" genes.bed > upstream.bed
Now either you can look for ChIP-seq data in you cell line of interest and see if the peaks are there in your region of interest by a simple
intersectBed -a peaks.bed -b upstream.bed -f 0.5
or
if you want to make predictions then you can fetch the sequences from genome
fastaFromBed is powerful tool to do so
And then just align your sequences and run meme motif scan, once you get the motifs, compare the matrix with the JASPAR or TRANSFAC ones.
hth
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