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                                           Background

Major advances have been made in understanding the evolution of transcriptional regulation using microevolutionary and macroevolutionary experimental approaches. The roles of stabilising selection and compensatory changes in an enhancer region have been elucidated in Drosophila. The molecular dynamics of regulatory alleles have been studied in plants. Evidence is accumulating for the involvement of regulatory evolution in morphological changes between closely related species, as well as in major changes of body plans. (Diethard Tautz. Curr Opin Genet Dev. 2000 Oct;10(5):575-9. Review)

                                                         Purpose

We want to find the variation of promoter and upstream region affect the body development of insects at embryo.

                          Methods

The sequences used come in files that contain two or more FastA formatted sequences of Drosophila melanogaster,  named EP________. These come from Genbank and a database called EPD (Eukaryotic promoter database) and were collected to study polymorphism in regulatory sequence in D. melanogaster in genes for which the transcription start site has been experimentally determined (currently only a small number of genes fulfill this criterion).

Then we needed to test a) if sequences with no polymorphism and with polymorphism have equal numbers of predicted transcription factor binding sites, and b) if more, equal, or less polymorphic sites are located within potential transcription factor binding sites in the sequences found polymorphism.

We use those two tools:

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/clustalw/ - make alignments.
http://genomatix.gsf.de/free_services/ - Matinspector to find predicted binding sites for transcription factors. ex.

                           Results

P-region1 and 2

US-regions1 and 2

                         Discussion

1. How to decide the correct transcription bind site

2. very conservative

3. http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu/genes/ - to look at the specific entries of genes and experimental 
data/papers that report on those.Á@